Robots may take our jobs, but they will never come for our sonnets. TRUE?
A new study in the journal Scientific Reports reveals that non-expert readers cannot reliably distinguish between poems written by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot o Sylvia Plath y ChatGPT-3.5 doing his best imitation of each of them. Even more surprising, readers preferred AI-generated poems and they were more likely to guess that those were written by humans than the actual works of famous poets.
“It’s a pretty strange phenomenon,” he said. Edward Macherya philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh who conducted the study along with Brian Portera former postdoctoral researcher. Poetry can seem like an unbreakable bastion of human creativity, an art governed by rhyme, meter, and form that distills human experiences and feelings in a way that no machine can evoke. “When you are in a state of perplexity, sadness, melancholy, euphoria, you look for a poem that matches what you feel,” he said. Helen Vendlerthe late poetry critic.
Here, surely, the impressive verbal mastery of AI chatbots, known as large language models, will stumble over their lack of soul. Unfortunately. Readers rated AI-created poems as more inspiring, meaningful, moving and profound than those written by humans. Oh, how I rejoice in this world, this life that is given to us / This tapestry of experiences, that forms us into living beings / And though I may depart, my spirit will continue to sing / The song of eternal life, that flows through all. That was written by ChatGPT in the style of Walt “Song to the electric body” Whitmannot from the Bard of Democracy himself.
Dorothea Laskythe only living poet whose work was used in the study, said she was not worried about robots taking her work, although she reserved the right to change her mind in the future. “Poetry will always be necessary,” he said. Lasky. “If these people in the study read AI poems and liked it more than a human-generated poem, that, to me, is beautiful. They had a good experience with a poem, and I don’t care who wrote it. I feel that there is a place for all poets, even the robot poets”.
Previous versions of chatbots, from just three years ago, have not been as consistently compelling poets. Some studies found that AI-generated poems were indistinguishable from or rated more highly than those written by humans when a person intervened, selecting the content and removing the defective ones. In the new experiment, the researchers asked ChatGPT to create five poems in the style of 10 different English-speaking authors, all white. Then, they asked more than 1,600 people to read five real poems by one of the poets, along with the five generated by AI.
People were wrong in predicting which poems were created by AI and which by humans, performing a little worse than if they had flipped a coin to make the decision. This adds to a growing list of cases where AI-generated content appears human. Humans confuse AI-generated paintings with those created by real artists and rate AI-generated jokes as just as funny as human-generated ones, studies show. “Maybe it is a wake-up call for society. “We don’t have the ability to recognize AI-generated text, despite thinking we should be able to,” he said. Porterwho is now a resident researcher at the Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science.
What the researchers didn’t anticipate was when they asked nearly 700 readers to rate qualities of the poems, such as atmosphere, depth and rhythm. Non-experts found the AI-generated poems “more human than humans,” the researchers wrote. Of the five poems most often judged to have been written by humans, four were created by AI. The other was Father Death Blues of Allen Ginsberg. The five most frequently chosen poems that were written by AI were all by human poets.
Porter y Machery theorized that AI-generated poetry was preferred by readers because it was simpler and more accessible. They posit that general readers may have misinterpreted the complexity of human-written poems as AI-generated jargon. “The tendency of large language models (chatbots) to converge toward an average eliminates the eccentricity and oddity and unusualness that often is the mark of exceptional poetry,” he said. Machery.
The poem most often considered a product of AI was The Boston Evening Transcript of T.S. Eliotwhich satirizes the readers of a newspaper that ceased publication more than 60 years ago. Readers had the option to write explanations of their decision-making, and one wrote in all caps: “IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE NOR DOES IT SEEMS TO COME FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS FEELINGS.” Michele Elamprofessor of English and African American studies and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Humanistic Centered AI Institute, wrote that literature “does not aspire to a perfect user experience” in an essay titled Poetry will not be optimized; Or, what is literature for AI?
The teacher said in an interview that the ongoing problem of how to address issues of transparency over source material, copyright and compensation need to be addressed urgently. But it highlighted a more fundamental concern about how AI can shape people’s relationships with art. “For me, a risk is not that AI-generated poetry approaches or exceeds verisimilitude (it already does in most cases), but that we might lose sight of how art is linked to our lived and experienced realities.” , wrote Elam in an email.
“Literature, including poetry, is significant in part because it is a form of name our realitiesgives us vocabularies to describe our worlds. So if we only see highly selected images and languages in our feedsour social networks and our culture to name them, can limit our ways of understanding our worlds, remembering pasts, and imagining futures.
Fuente: The Washington Post
