From the alt-text of a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon of a few days ago: “Anyone who thinks AI endangers poets should first prove that there exists a poetry journal with more readers than contributors.“
I actually looked up the AI poetry project that this comic is referencing, and I have good news, for given value of ‘good:’ while most of the population may not be able to recognize an Allen Ginsburg or Sylvia Plath poem if it bit them on the ass, but the ones who can will be the ones who actually decide what poems get published in the aforementioned journals. As for flooding the commercial market: joke’s on you, Scooter Magee! There is no commercial market! Good luck trying to make a living on AI verslop when nobody pays money for poetry anyway!
The only poets who get paid of late are people who write song lyrics.
I can think of things LLMs are less suited for, but I do have to think to come up with them.
Seriously, an extended metaphor utilizing alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia and a rhyme scheme, couched in iambic pentameter, for the purpose of conveying an abstract emotion or philosophical thought?
The computer program is doomed to failure.
That’s before considering that the great poets intentionally bend and break the rules of the form all the freaking time.
Whoever thought this was a good idea, knows nothing about poetry.
But I wouldn’t be surprised to see such a thing being funded by the RIAA. Pop music is a derivative wasteland of trite sentiments targeting those too young to know better. I’m sure the major labels would LOVE to automate the process.
Who gets to claim the songwriting Grammy when a computer inevitably wins one?
(Who am I kidding, no one cares about the Grammys, Jimmy Carter and Hillary! have several, so that’s how honest they are)
Sad thing is, PopSlop has gotten so bad, the AI songs….. well they’re not objectively better, but they’re subjectively more *interesting,* which isn’t nothing in Entertainment.™
I actually did some work with an AI company, and I can tell you that the model I was working with couldn’t write poetry to save its miserable life. It was incapable of internal rhyme, alliteration, and maintaining meter. It was just as incapable of evaluating poetry. Our job was to create prompts that would “break” the AI – that is, write a prompt that the AI could not fulfill. Poetry could do it every time. For all of those poets out there worried that an AI is going to come and freeze them out of the poetry market – don’t be. The only thing AI brings to the table is a legitimate reason to avoid poetry.
I had the impression that poetry hasn’t had a mainstream audience since Kipling.
In what I am sure is a complete coincidence, many many moons ago when I knew literature majors interested in poetry, they confidently told me their professors really didn’t like Kipling and avoided spending time on him.