As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult. This study examined whether non-expert readers could reliably differentiate between AI-generated poems and those written by well-known human poets. We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems (46.6% accuracy, χ2(1, N = 16,340) = 75.13, p < 0.0001). Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems (χ2(2, N = 16,340) = 247.04, p < 0.0001). We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.
If it’s literally indistinguishable from human poetry, about as many people want to read it as there are people wanting to read human poetry. And that’s about 12.
I don’t give a fuck if it surpasses human poetry to a focus group or if poetry is popular enough for you to care. I’m making a larger point that it’s a misuse of technology. Some things are pointless without a human personally taking time to craft it. We have loads of inefficiently produced things that exist because they’re “handmade” or came from the heart.
It’s like when Google screwed up during the Olympics with that commercial where Gemini made a little girl’s fan letter for an athlete. The whole point of a fan letter from a little girl is that it’s personal and took time. It’s not supposed to be perfect and efficiently produced. It could be 80% misspelled and written in crayon and be more meaningful than anything a machine produces.
Or maybe accept that this idea was crap all along?
You desperately try to create some form of human superiority, just to feel important. That superiority doesn’t exist. There’s no value in anything just because it’s made with “love”, that’s an illusion.
Wow, that’s a horrendously bleak and depressing take. Of course you can’t put a price tag on that (why would you want to?), but you’re not seriously suggesting that human love has no emotional value, right?
A love letter from your partner, or the diary of a passed relative, or your child’s drawings? All of these things might be objectively worse than something a machine could produce. But would you feel the same when you received a love letter that’s just been printed off of ChatGPT? Humans are more than profit-producing machines, despite what capitalists want you to believe. And there is value in human interaction.
Value is a human construct. In absolute terms, nothing has value, in practical terms, a bottlecap can be the most valuable item in the world. What attributes value to things is the human condition, remove the human and you have a tool, perhaps.
Exactly. And putting value into things just because they’re made by humans is a stupid idea.
Humans don’t exist on a separate plane, removed from everything natural and artificial. That’s hubris galore.
It’s maybe stupid for you, but clearly not for everyone. For example, an AI could create the History of a planet that we do not know it even exists; meanwhile, I won’t call stupid those people interested in reading that, but currently I’ll read the History of this planet written by humans, if asked. In a nutshell, my point is there is value either way, but poems written by machines? I will leave those to scientists and scholars, at least for now.
I understand what you mean, and also understand the nihilistic stance, however, the same way humans don’t exist in a separate plane, the selfception and empathy toward others (which is not unique to us) allows a more than zero sum interpretation of art. Naturally the technical part can be reproduced by machines but the metaphysical part cannot. What becomes interesting is the notion that the metaphysical can be created post-hoc, which puts us squarely in the same situation as other poster wrote by quoting the passage of “The man in the high castle”.
He/she is onto something though. An example of it is games made by people who care and love the field being bold and pushing for new cool and interesting stuff vs. games made by companies just wanting money with 0 effort and using the same boring formula.
Poetry isn’t for the one reading it, it’s for the one writing it.
Why publish books of it, then?
So they don’t have to get other jobs
Literally dozens of them.