Showing posts with label Shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shakespeare. Show all posts

Thursday, November 14, 2024

Readers prefer ChatGPT poems over Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath

 


Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is one of the English poets whose work was used in the study.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Readers prefer ChatGPT poems over Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath 

In a new study, participants with no expert knowledge in poetry were also unable to distinguish whether the verses were created by a person or a machine


JORDI PÉREZ COLOMÉ
NOV 14, 2024 - 12:24 COT

“Oh, how I revel in this world, this life that we are given / This tapestry of experiences, that shapes us into living / And though I may depart, my spirit will still sing / The song of life eternal, that flows through everything.” These are the opening lines of a poem generated by ChatGPT 3.5 in the style of Walt Whitman. This poem was presented to a panel of nearly 700 people with no specialized knowledge of poetry, who were asked to choose between classic English poems and poems produced by AI in a matter of seconds.


A new study, published in Scientific Reports,compares dozens of poems generated by ChatGPT to those written by classic English poets, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and Allen Ginsberg. The researchers conducted two experiments: one asked participants to determine whether a poem was written by a human or AI, and the other assessed the quality of the poems. In both cases, the AI-generated poems either passed as human-written or even outperformed their human counterparts. Notably, the researchers did not select the “best” poem written by ChatGPT, but rather chose the first result.

So, how did this happen? The simple answer is that poetry is inherently difficult to interpret, and the reading group preferred poems that were more accessible, which they mistakenly associated with human authorship.

“The results suggest that the average reader prefers poems that are easier to understand and that they can understand,” says Brian Porter, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and co-author of the study. The panel seemed to interpret complex verses by poets like T.S. Eliot as “hallucinations,” dismissing them as impossible to have been written by humans. The five highest-rated poems were all generated by AI, while the lowest-rated poems were human-written.

“Some participants explained that the emotional content of a poem was a sign that it was written by a human,” explains Porter, although these poems were actually produced by ChatGPT. “Others seem to interpret confusing or difficult lines as AI errors, rather than intentional choices by a poet. The results suggest that people take liking a poem as a sign that it was written by a human, rather than an AI.”


The study’s focus, however, was not on people’s ability to distinguish between English-language classics and AI-generated poems, but on how well AI can mimic human writing. In this, AI succeeded: “The main takeaway from the experiment is that AI is capable of creating poems that convey emotions and ideas in a way that convincingly resembles human authorship,” Porter states.

And what would the experts do?

Would a group of critics, academics, or poetry experts have given more precise answers? A group of Spanish academics already asked this question. Collaborating with Argentine writer Patricio Pron, they competed with AI-generated stories and had them judged by a small panel of critics. The human writer won: “The difference between critics and casual readers is immense,” says Julio Gonzalo, a professor at Spain’s UNED university and author of this study.

“AI is easy to confuse non-experts,” says Guillermo Marco, a UNED researcher and poet, and co-author of the work with Pron. “We reach a conclusion that we may already have known, but it is very good to have measured it: a well-designed blockbuster with big data can have a better chance of success than something more risky,” Marco adds.


Working with Patricio Pron had the advantage of using new, original stories. The researchers acknowledge the challenge in conducting a similar study with experts on classic poems. “We suspect that a group of poetry experts could do it better, and we plan to try it soon, but that means finding classic poems that poetry experts do not immediately recognize, which is quite difficult,” says Porter.

Interestingly, when participants were informed that a poem was AI-generated, they automatically liked it less. This reaction may reflect human skepticism toward machine-generated art, a trend Porter doesn’t think will disappear anytime soon: “I’m not sure people will ever fully accept AI-generated poetry — or even AI-generated art in general. Language is often a tool for one person to communicate ideas to another, and AI, at its core, is just mimicking that.”

It's an aesthetic issue

In their latest article, Gonzalo and Marco show that machines don’t need extraordinary capabilities to outperform human judgment when evaluating creative texts. Even a small language model with 500 million parameters (compared to the 175 billion parameters of newer versions of ChatGPT) was enough to pass most of the criteria for a common reader with flying colors. “With these experiments, we delve into questions more related to sociology and aesthetics — about how taste is shaped by society or education,” Marco explains. “It’s difficult to judge art without sufficient prior experience,” he adds.


Marco is more blunt about the limits of AI’s ability to create artistic experiences: “Art is about communicating human experience. AI is a very, very powerful tool, but it will end up becoming like an autotune for creativity. It will never be autonomous nor have the need to express itself unless given instructions.”

This success of AI over human judgment has prompted the researchers to consider whether there should be regulation requiring clear warnings when content is generated by AI. “If readers value AI-generated texts less, and there is no warning that AI-generated text is being used, there’s a risk that people may be misled into paying for something they would not have accepted had they known it involved AI-generated text or art,” says Porter.


EL PAÍS 

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Shakespeare / Sonnet 116


Sonnet 116

by William Shakespeare 
(1609)
clr gif

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


In this staple of wedding ceremonies, "mind" probably means something nearer to what we mean by the word "spirit". Or we have a more modern term that covers it: "soul-mate". From this poem we can, as is so often the case, give the last word to Shakespeare, a succinct characterisation of the wish for enduring love: "Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds."


John Stammers
Wednesday 9 February 2011 10.26 GMT





Thursday, January 28, 2016

Don Paterson / Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets / Review



40 Sonnets review – the perfect vehicle for Don Paterson’s craft and lyricism


The poet tugs and stretches a demanding form to its limit in work of vividness and potency


Sarah Crown
Saturday 26 September 2015

D
on Paterson has a thing for sonnets. Back in 1999 he brought out an anthology of 101 of his favourites, and in 2012 he delved deeper into their history with Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a passionate, personal response to the great man’s form-defining sequence. Nor has he confined himself to curation and criticism: in 2006, he produced a warm, responsive reworking of Rilke’s 55-sonnet cycle, Orpheus, while his original collections are punctuated by his own efforts, some of which (such as Landing Light’s superlative “Waking with Russell”) count among his finest poems. “The square of the sonnet exists for reasons which are almost all direct consequences of natural law … and the grain and structure of the language itself,” he said, attempting to explain the form’s abiding appeal – and his own fascination with it – in an article in this newspaper. “Or to put it another way: if human poetic speech is breath and language is soapy water, sonnets are just the bubbles you get.”

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

William Shakespeare / Sonnet XXIX

William Shakespeare
SONNET XXIX
By William Shakespeare

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.


Rufus Mainswright sings
Shakespeare's Sonnet XXIX
With images from "Pride and Prejudice"