4 ms·
Poetry, like humor, involves the use of the reader's expectations, but is typically most effective when subverting those expectations. There's a lot of bad poe
by ubertaco 2y ago
Poetry, like humor, involves the use of the reader's expectations, but is typically most effective when subverting those expectations.
There's a lot of bad poetry in the world that just follows readers' expectations. I should know, I've written some of it. Unfortunately, I'd suspect that most readers' understanding of poetry lacks that crucial element of subversion, and so an LLM – which mostly just spits out the most-probable, most-expected next token – looks like what people think poetry is.
An LLM would not have created the curtal sonnet form, because it would've been too busy following the rules of a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Similarly, an LLM wouldn't create something that intentionally breaks the pattern of a form in order to convey a sense of brokenness or out-of-place-ness, because it's too locked in on the most-common-denominator from previous inputs. And yet, many of the most powerful works I've read are the ones that can convey a disjointed feeling on purpose – something an LLM is specifically geared not to do.
Poetry aims for the heart, and catches the mind along the way. An LLM does not have the requisite complex emotional intelligence, and is indeed a pretty poor simulation of emotional intelligence.
Consider Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant, which is powerful because it is so suddenly shocking, as it describes something that sounds perhaps like an artist or author, until it very suddenly doesn't, on the last line:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
and the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
he knew human folly like the back of his hand,
and was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
when he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
and when he cried the little children died in the streets.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago>There's a lot of bad poetry in the world that just follows readers' expectations. I should know, I've written some of it. Apparently, in 'the good old days (of the internet)', your poetry would be published by yourself, on your webpage - complete with a starry-twinkling background, a 'number of visitors' counter in the bottom right, and in a pink font. I miss those days.
- frumper 2y agodon't forget the auto-playing MIDI music playing in the background
- hgomersall 2y agoIt can be obvious and go to the heart. I'm not sure Wilfred Owen's Dulce et decorum est is anything other than straight down the line, but it made me cry when I first read it. That said, maybe the subversion is in how the reality is contrasted with the marketing.
- npinsker 2y agoI see 'subversion' as more broad. In good poetry, subversion is constantly happening at a micro level, through playing with meaning, meter, word choice. I think it's very easy to identify AI-generated poetry because it lacks any of that -- but on the flip side, if you don't understand the rules, you don't understand how to subvert them. Even in Dulce et decorum est -- though the meaning's straightforward, there are plenty of small, subversive (and pretty) ideas in the meter. For example, the line "He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning" is an unexpected, disruptive staccato that really sounds like guttering, choking, drowning. It's a beautiful poem and is overflowing with such examples. (I think this applies to art as a whole, not just poetry.)
- cguess 2y agoEven the last line of the poem is a twist on expectations and plays on the irony of nationalism and patriotism, the beautiful latin phrase that inspires young men and the harsh reality of trench warfare that it leads them into. No LLM is going to do that.
- hgomersall 2y agoFunnily enough, the phrase doesn't even shy away from the fact that you are dying for your country. The poem really gets at the fact that the way you die is horrible and that in itself is enough to counter the romantic notion. The reality of dying for your fatherland is not cleanly and painlessly dropping from your mount in a heroic and successful cavalry charge, even if that is good.
- magicalhippo 2y ago> Consider Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant, which is powerful because it is so suddenly shocking Not very, given the title... Should be noted I do my best to avoid trailers, they totally spoil movies/shows for me.
- ilaksh 2y agoOne could literally take Claude 3.5 Sonnet New or o1-preview and disprove this in an hour or two just by prompting the AI to try to exhibit the type of poetry you want and then maybe asking it to do a little bit of automated critique and refinement. You can also experiment with having a higher temperature, (maybe just for the first draft). You claim that LLMs can't make poetry like that. I bet they can if you just ask them to.
- 8note 2y agoif im reading the gp properly, theyre saying that an llm isnt capable od inventing new poetry forms. of its easy, can you provide some poetry forms youve coaxed sonnet to create, with some exemplary poems in the form?
- ilaksh 2y agoWhat he said was basically that it just couldn't create unexpected verses or break form. Since supposedly it can only do the most probable token -- but that's not how sampling works unless you use temperature 0. And it can easily be instructed to break from a strict form (which would create a new variation of the form) for effect if it made sense. You could also ask it to create a new form and it could. I don't work for you so I don't have to create examples, but anyone who has used the latest SOTA models for any amount of time knows this capability is expected, and if you were really interested then you would try it. If you feel the result isn't very good, ask it to improve it.
- jart 2y agoI could program even a markov chain to generate a lot of odd unusual potentially interesting stuff, but no one would call any of it a new form of poetry, because establishing something like that requires social status, which robots don't have.
- NeutralCrane 2y agoIf only new forms of poetry are valid, doesn’t that invalidate 99.9% of poetry created by human beings?
- 2y ago