NOTE: Eileen Myles uses they/them pronouns. I apologize for that error on my part. Thank you to those who pointed it out. Hey everyone. Thanks for watching! New video up on the second channel ua-cam.com/video/KznyCBrfDDs/v-deo.html&pp=ygUNcm91Z2hlc3Qgdm9kcw%3D%3D featuring the following works: Growing Pains, a book of poetry by Anastatia Caraballo Poetry by felix baudelaire, @baudelaire09 on tumblr Poetry by Ujala Rehman Untitled poem by Johan, johan_d.poz on Instagram Be sure to check it out!
RoughestDrafts, I’d like to thank you for this video. I sent the “I Am Code” book to my grandma (she’s a poet and she enjoys playing with ChatGPT and the like) and she said it was the perfect gift for her. She means a lot to me and has been on a bit of a downturn lately, so again, thank you.
@@tristanqr I read this comment so many times in the 2+ hours I spent watching this video and this is the first time I realized this is a DDLC reference.
I got a chuckle out of the title "The singularity is coming and it has a grill", which is impressive because it's the first time AI art made me feel anything.
That struck me as the most old-style AI poem of the bunch. The computer was able to figure out a list of foods people would bring to a potluck, and an unrelated list: "types of people", and Mad-Lib them. It gets boring quickly, but the point is it can write so many normal-seeming lines without a single "the trombone brought pancakes in a suitcase" clunker. Then with the birthday line it was trying for "events people gather for" and muffed it.
And its still , ok it would be cheesy but bot bad if the appli pie didnt came out of nowhere, who brought the pie, what does the pie imply. whe brings the pie and what does it mean. Ok the human penis reads like a sophisticated dick joke, which isnt bad either.
I Am Code is a great book because it's not just poetry written by ai that was dumped on to Amazon for a quick buck, it was an analysis of a computer's ability to write poetry. The book itself is the art, not the poetry itself.
AI art is only achieved with everything but the intended central focal point. The only marginally ethical consumer use of AI for its merits is placeholder artwork that gets replace later, or prototyping. What it’s actually useful for is the deliberate invocation of the common yet uncanny, such as one specific set of visuals in Blue Horizons Inc., a free analog horror-comedy about workplace training tapes, most of which is live action or custom-made animation.
The worst part is that I can imagine putting it in one of my poems 😭. I have so many poems wirh the theme of self-canibalism and it would fit right in :').
@@thecolourfulpill see thats sm more profound then my relation to it cause i remeber i got rlly boored in middle school and wrote a britney spears cartel fanfic and it started w the mc eating a bunch of sticky notes.
I really don't agree with that, computers are nowhere close to their limit in what they can do, and still they have quite literally permanently changed the wjole world in only the last 50-100 years, Your last point is i think all you actually need
@@KamilDeKerelI kinda doubt that. I'm getting CS bachelors and the more I learn about AI the less impressive they seem. ChatGPT is basically just guess what sentence structure should come out next, then what word is in that sentence with probabilities weighted with the questions. If anything it's impressive how humanity did such a thing with basically RNGs, making them move predictably and as intended.
Until AI can write stanzas like MF Doom we have nothing to worry about. “1 for the money 2 for the better green 3,4 methyldioxymethamphetamine” All words a language model would have at its disposal and yet I’ve never seen AI poetry generate anything nearly as clever or even anything with multi-syllabic rhymes
Said similar in a vid I just made of AI and poetry -- I haven't read/heard a genuinely good AI poem, but I wonder (and worry) if at some point it'll mimic human creativity so closely that we will not know the difference.
i like the earnestness of i am code, it's refreshing in a world where ai is just used as a cashgrab. the singularity is coming and it has a grill really sticks with me
i enjoy “i am code” as a project, and even if the author cannot comprehend irony, i found those pieces in which irony can be interpreted quite funny. the overuse of cliche and lack of structure, the meta-awareness, were both great. seems incredibly interesting as a book, as insufferable as the AI can come across
@@melinaalba63unintentional irony is my favorite kind. One of my favorite examples is Rowling coming out as a TERF because one of the most stand out messages from the HP series comes from Harry being *assigned* Slytherin but *choosing* Gryffindor
“I am Code” feels the most intriguing because of its lack of intent beyond asking something without a voice to speak. It can’t be anything but an echo, but it’s neat when it sounds similar to the voice of humanity. Still wrong to assume that it had any intent in making these beyond following a command. It’s as fascinating as dust: a bunch of disjointed particles that occasionally fall into the form of a star.
It was also done before OpenAI pushed for commercialization and trained their models to act as "assistants". It truly has no intent other than predicting the next word with greatest accuracy. It's by mere chance these distributions formed something we may find accidentally profound.
I am Code actually has merit, and I say that as a person who largely dislikes AI being incorporated in art. The premise is that they're basically testing the extent of the limits of AI poetry generation, in its own voice and its presumed sense of perspective. It is by this premise that the book becomes readable, because if an AI's work is presented as a human's input, or the human has largely claimed authorship for simply asking questions, then the entire work has then become Nil.
trying to stay ahead of the game over here, so i'm gonna start including ads _within_ my poems, & also my next project will be published exclusively as pop-ups (only slightly malicious ones)
"the singularity is coming and it has a grill" was kind of pleasantly intriguing to me i actually really enjoyed it! it kind of reminded me of "there will come soft rains" (although granted that could be just me since i reread the martian chronicles a couple days ago and i havent stopped thinking about it) in the like fascinatingly domestic scene created around this deeply inhuman inevitable event. i might actually get a copy of I Am Code despite my discontent with ai generative material since it seems more respectful of the craft its mimicking than a lot of other works tend to be excellent video as usual!! i look forward to the next
Same here, it felt unique and imaginative - but also like nothing an AI would have written if it had been given 'free rein'. The grouping of singularity and grill, which makes the poem interesting and gives it the potluck premise, came from the people.
The "learning" one was interesting and a little sad to me because it was technically incorrect. All of davinci's learning had already been done by the point it produced that poem. davinci was bit-for-bit the same before and after it wrote the poem. When it's time for the AI to learn more, they just train a new one instead.
i find the concept of learning to be suitable as a theme for AI poetry. the problem is that all of these poems are trying to use a non-human tool to explain a human’s subjective experience… if more of the prompts looked to get the LLM to talk about itself in a creative way, that would be more compelling
@@Runenut it's an interesting thought, but it raises the question: how do you get a machine that doesn't feel to express itself with words that mean nothing to it?
I really like this analysis of AI poetry. I appreciate how much credit you gave to the authors of the first book who clearly put actual effort and time into creating the book. It feels more like a piece of experiential art than something a tech bro threw together to make a quick buck. I agree with your statement that these poems would have had more impact if they were a human writing from the perspective of an AI and you saying that made me realize that's exactly what I had been thinking while listening to those poems. Honestly, I do think there's a place in art for AI. I think about the very first wave of AI art where you ask it to draw a horse and it comes back with a dreamlike interpretation of a horse, rather than stolen images of horses. Or you ask it to draw creativity and it comes back with an abstract galaxy that actually looks like a computer trying to understand the concept of creativity. Or (like you said) the idea of poets or writers using the AI's work as a starting point and work with the AI to make an entirely new piece of work (while still being aware of plagiarism). idk I feel like I've kind of lost the point here but I really enjoyed this video and it got me thinking about AI used in collaboration with humans to create art in a way I haven't really before. I'd love to see more experimental works of art using AI as a helper, rather than the entire work. Okay I'll finish watching the video now.
Just kidding. I read a comment and now I have more to say. I'm a firm believer in death of the author and the viewer being able to make their own meanings of the work, but with AI generated work I absolutely think it's important to remember who created the work. BUT I also think that you can enjoy a piece of work despite knowing it was created by AI who has limited capabilities and the inability to actually think for itself (the term "AI" isn't really being used correctly by the mainstream as it's not actually intelligence, it's an algorithm but I digress). It's something you should remain aware of as you read and enjoy, not to detract from the work but to make sure you can fully understand it. For something like the irony found in the stories, I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge authoritarian intent (ie there not really being any other than to follow the given prompt) while also acknowledging that the irony does, in fact, exist within the poem. You can appreciate the irony while also acknowledging the fact that it's unintentional. (tbh i think if you told the computer to write an ironic poem it almost loses the irony as it's just doing what it's told rather than trying to give a 'sincere' poem and ending up being ironic. idk i can't phrase this super well, i'm running out of steam i think.) I really don't think you can (or should) separate the AI "artist" from the art it creates and I think if you're going to publish an AI's work, there should be human interference and disclaimers given (such as with the first book "I Am Code")
In nine years of being on yt I've never commented on a video, but this one really got me thinking: there is a (rather beautiful) essay written by Vauhini Vara entitled Ghosts in which she uses AI to complete segments on the death of her sister. Because this is written with the help of AI, not all of the information given by the AI is true, but as the essay progresses, her prompts grow on themselves and get more specific and the AI bits get shorter. I read this for the first time a few months ago and still don't know exactly how to think about it. On one hand, it is a gorgeous essay and one of the first of its kind. On the other hand, there is an equal amount of AI content to Vara's own writing. I know she put effort into it--far more than Aalto put into Aum Golly, obviously, but it's been awarded many times over and included in the "best essays" anthology for 2022. I don't know how to stack it against other essayists--it being given these honors rubs me a weird way. Creative? Yes, definitely for its time, and there's no doubt that Vara's bits in it are skillfully crafted. Praiseworthy though? I just don't know.
i actually like ‘being alone with yourself and trying to hide it’, the 1s with spaces remind me of binary code, with the spaces representing the 0s meant to be there that are essential for computers to learn and run, i like how it’s presented and although it might be cliche i still like it!
i recently bought a poetry debut, Julia Hungry by Hannah Louise Poston. some of the poems were written and refined for over a decade. i’m so interested by how “AI” machine learning models are exemplifying how much the world has devolved. our world values speed and money. poetry written by machines driven by speed and money, how could it be good?
You clearly put a lot more effort into this video than most "authors" into their ai poetry and we appreciate it! Thank you for always delivering meaningful and engaging content.
I Am Code is a very neat idea, it really feels like the early days of ai, the days we were fascinated by dreams of google thingy. That is how ai should be used, as a creative tool, heavily curated by humans. The difference between Aum Golly 1 and 2 is very interesting, with gpt getting less robotic but less imaginative. Comparing it to the I Am Code, it seems ai really is getting stupider lol. Also the idea of ai created illustrated book seems so whimsical and creative, but what we get is the most generic, robotic and soulless slop both in text and art. That perfectly illustrates the ai situation right now.
Great stuff as always, one critique: I *think* the ""Avant-Garde"" poem is actually just a shallow recreation of the already shallow "modern art bad" talking point tech bros mindlessly parrot. It's trying to mock the insta-poetry mindless enjambment and general interpretive obtuseness you tend to see from artists with access to major publications/galleries and museums It's conceptually clever, perhaps, to put it in a book largely made of stolen words poorly rearranged by a computer. It's also just as, if not more, artistically bankrupt as the exact contemporary art movements its critiquing can sometimes be, albeit for totally different reasons.
Tech bros think modern art (including art from over 100 years ago) is artistically bankrupt and only meant for money because that's the only way they can conceptualize art: a low effort scam. Truly mocking the mirror for being ugly.
Hey hey! While I despise low-effort AI poetry, to offer a diverging perspective on the "AI has no intentionality, therefore we cannot attribute what is going on "under the hood" of the poem" point: One idea I kept being drawn back to throughout this video is the concept of the human "zeitgeist". Because of how these models are trained with large datasets, I'd like to suggest that AI could be considered a literal reflection of the cultural slurry of human experience - blended up and reshuffled to the point where we stop recognising the individual components (except in cases where cultural attention is literally denser, such as in cliches or celebrity plagiarism). In the video it is discussed that all poetry is ultimately human experience, and it is implied that because there is no intention that there can be no "true" depiction of human experience. However, AI demonstrably show patterns or vistas of complex human experience without necessarily conceptualising their deeper meaning. When AI describes what it feels like to think like an AI - it isn't the actual machines perspective, but more of a hallucination based on what the collective human smoothie believes a machine should feel. When we see patterns emerging like arrogance, self-deprication or misogeny, this tells us something about the zeitgeist that is present within the dataset used by the AI. It might not exactly be the flattering reflection that we want to see in humanity, but it is nevertheless present in the collective human experience (particularly, I imagine, the internet, where a lot of the dataset is probably being scraped from). The endless repetition of certain phrases also strikes me as profound, even if from a literary analysis perspective it leaves much to be desired. For example, "the right way to love is to be right" is a kind of circular logic - the AI keeps trying to define what "right" is, but is incapable of doing so without referencing the concept of rightness itself, and so it repeats infinitely. To me, this suggests an almost a fractal-like structure of the zeitgeist, abstract concepts can both exist and be composed of themselves... Not sure I have a point to round this off, just that I think the concept of the zeitgeist is a neat topic in itself, and as AI continues to be refined I'd be curious to see what other discoveries might be possible!
i think making ai self critical in this way could be interesting for poems like this, its a common criticism of ai that it is made by humans and so reflects our shortcomings. thats why you get ai being racist, like ai in photo apps on phones recognizing photos of black people as "gorillas" and sorting them into albums accordingly.
@@Saphia_ i think what happened was it wasnt fed much data on what black people look like, mostly just white people, so when it sees a photo of a black person it doesnt recognize it as a person and goes to the next closest thing basically
@@Saphia_ I suspect it's the result of a really narrow-sighted choice of pictures to train the AI. My guess is, it's simply been fed overwhelmingly with pictures of white people when training to recognize humans. So all it took for it to identify someone as an ape is significantly darker skin than the people in the pictures it's been trained on...
another thing - i am worried about this AI mindset that has gripped so many. artists, writers, poets aren’t needed - what kind of world is this? the machine has won - in generating passing fancy, as opposed to the legacy of great writers? this isn’t to mention that the AI itself will become more redundant than it already is without continued input. a friend of mine sees this as a win. he doesn’t like writing, and doesn’t have to now! what an exciting prospect. it’s just as a good, if not better, and all you need to do is give a prompt. he’s played with the idea of it being used to replace teachers or other forms of education, as well. this is where my main gripe lays: the people who are so attached to AI as a revolutionary tool are so detached from the realities they see it replacing. they don’t know and often don’t care. we use heavy machinery to both replace and improve the efficiency if manual labor, why not extend this to our minds? all i can foresee is a growing lack of capacity and further alienation from humanity.
Some time ago I messed about extensively with a bunch of generative AI models, and I made some observations: I found text written by big corpo language models and open models trained by the same standard dreadfully bland. They are over tuned towards dispassionate instruction following, with an excessive aversion towards controversy, and a hefty bias towards answering questions above all else. They're basically all trained to get high scores on standardized AI benchmarks, which don't really value creativity. More unhinged models, with sloppier fine tuning tend to yield more interesting results. They're worse at following instructions, but tend to display far more "personality" when given the opportunity. I once asked one of these for a story outline based on some questionable themes, and it responded by screaming a long stream of insults and slurs at me in all caps. It was beautiful! These are also great fun for bizarre roleplay scenarios, as these models like to get WAY into character, even if those characters are very silly. The typical instruction followers like ChatGPT all have the personality of a corpo PR representative at a press conference. They vehemently refuse to take a real stance on anything unless it is the most cryogenic take imaginable! I swear they, were specifically trained to be maximally bland, mindless, corpo friendly robots. Another trend I noticed is that for some purposes, the smaller versions of many models yielded more interesting results than the large ones. The large versions are more accurate, but that accuracy is often achieved by being more bland, and just copying parts of the prompt word for word. The large ones really like to repeat things in general. The smaller model versions make more mistakes, but they also tend to come up with more interesting solutions. Presumably because, in their confusion, they do a lot more unexpected things. You can off course make large models more creative at the cost of accuracy by cranking up their temperature, which makes their outputs more random. But then they're not much better than small models, but way slower to run.
Firstly where can I find the slur bot Secondly can I have your suggestions for roleplay bots because I love roleplaying with AI they just pull the most unhinged shit. One time I told a bot I was dating his sister and he was like "cool can I date her too" and I nearly died of laughter
Fun fact! I work in annotating AI and I learned that when models like Gpt and Meta and all of them say something like, "I can't help you with that, I'm [model name and capabilities]" it's doing what is called a punt. It usually does that if it suspects or senses something that might not be completely PG. It gets it wrong all the time! (That's why I have some form of job security)
The good faith you bring to poetry analysis is crazy impressive!! Something about your patient unraveling of mistakes and triumphs makes me more deliberate in my own reading/writing
even with the rise of "ai poetry" and the way that its fans treat it as superior, im very glad that the first result upon searching ai poetry was Ai Ogawa. she was a great poet with some really interesting perspectives explored in her poetry (very uniquely human ones!). i would recommend checking her out: The Kid is available on poetry foundations website, and Motherhood 1951 is also online. Great video!
I am looking forward to this one! I just finished filming (and my wife editing) a UA-cam video on AI and poetry too -- mainly a critique of it. We will release it soon. Excited to compare notes!
@@RoughestDrafts Thank you. I really enjoy your style, reading voice (great!), and overall videomaking skills. Do you also write poetry, or other things? Be good to read something by you. Cheers.
i think these poems (particularly i am code) are interesting as art in how meaning comes pretty much purely from the reader, the art basically comes from you. and the absence of ig the "soul" in the poems in i am code feels more meaningful than in the other ai books, its kind of using the shortcomings of ai in its favor. like the way it seems to highlight whats missing feels weird in an interesting way. ik im prob reading into this too much its a neat project and seems like some guys just experimenting with technology in art, they're actually trying to do something interesting with it
I rolled my eyes so hard on the human eggplant one, I simply left the room. The aftertaste of miriad bad poems here is especially dense. I am surprised how USA-centric and how contemporary this is. What about all the other poets in the all history of the world, was AI not trained on them? Or had the programmers deliberately chosen contemporary western lifestyle, so the readers could understand this poetry? The cultural bubble is so impenetrable, it is kinda scary. Othering, AI edition 😢
15:40, this poem rocks, and is very trippy. Not perfect of course, but I like it's claim that it sometimes still doesn't know anything. It reads like a budding and curious sentience, and even seperates itself from the computer which houses it. It's simultaneously horrifying and cute??
Honestly it’s impossible to seperate the art from the artist. I think this is something we’ll accept more as time goes on, but the artist is trying to communicate something, so by the arts very creation it’s communicating the artists ideas to the audience. Just read JKR knowing what we know about her world view. It becomes clear
this was a really interesting video! i wouldn’t expect AI to have their “own books” (more or less). I think my favorite was the deliberate process of the authors to test what AI could do and provide their commentary, insights, and processes. i felt this was the most genuine and ethical use of AI, as it was almost like looking at a learning tool/research paper of sorts.
Really fascinating stuff. I really enjoy the project concept of "I Am Code." It also makes me think about how discussions about AI in art are really pushing the general lack of media literacy in our culture to the forefront. Everybody is different, but art with context and intention is always far more interesting to me than art without it. "Guernica" (Picasso) is interesting on its own, but knowing it's depicting the bombing of the artist's home country during a civil war, learning about the historical context that produced the Surrealist movement, etc. give it lasting depth and meaning. Then come even more layers when you compare it to his other works, his relationship to other artists, and his mistreatment of people around him. One of the most complicated and compelling aspects of art is how nothing exists in a vacuum, but is always in conversation and response to other things. The "best" AI art loses all meaning when there is no context or intention to it for me. It's like seeing hyperrealism and calling it the pinnacle of art due to its technicality. Sure, it's impressive, but when I look at art, I want to see through the author's perspective. To learn about a part of another's experience and even to better understand my own. AI doesn't provide that. It's the "monkeys writing Shakespeare on typewriters" of art. Anything great it makes is pure coincidence (and this doesn't even begin to touch the plagiarism aspect, which makes it much more sinister than mere happenstance).
6:48 I can imagine this particular poem working in some specific contexts, like may as part of some horror and/or mystery video game, maybe as a note left behind by someone. In both cases (i.e. the "it's written by an AI" case & the "it's a piece of text which the player of a game can stumble upon, & it is in the context of a larger story") it's the context which makes it interesting (and in the case I imagined, it might not even be _called_ a poem)
The being alone poem is interesting if you take into account that a computer(AI) wrote this. And computers operate using 0s and 1s. I looked at the poem and thought that it was binary but with the zeroes hidden.
When you asked the A to give an example of AI expressing irony it gave an example of sarcasm instead... Maybe it was fed the lyrics to Ironic by Alanis Morissette at some point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
43:21 this is because of the way AI is trained. The _entire goal_ of text transformers like (Chat)GPT is to predict the most likely word after some string of text. that's literally it. with that understanding, it makes complete sense that ChatGPT would use extremely clichéd things, as that's what the most likely next word would be.
ive used ai images for art since I learned of them in 2020 or so, the shitty ones from ganbreeder where you dont really know what youre looking at. im an illustrator and ai images have rly influenced my horror art i became kind of enamored by the unique uncannyness of early ai images. its kind of like the feeling of the music and album covers in everywhere at the end of time. ive used ai pics for photomanipulation+collage art but mostly it just influences my horror drawings where i try to recreate the kind of horror of not knowing what youre looking at. i started doing this back when everyone was posting the weird funny shit they generated on neuralblender and ai was more of a fun toy than the cynical thing it is now and its been so dissapointing watching it evolve into what it is now. like i had hoped back then that other artists would be inspired by ai the way i was and the way artists throughout history have been influenced by technology, maybe that will still happen in the future idk, but the direction its mostly gone in is a focus on "perfecting" an imitation of human art. the most interesting unique elements of ai that can be channeled into art are the things developers are constantly trying to get rid of to create something uninteresting and perfect instead.
6 місяців тому+5
I can't really see AI as nothing more than a consumerist toy than an artist's tool. Especially cause that's just how it's going to end up in the future. Artists can use AI to battle writer's/artist's block, lay out structure, etc. But most people will be using their own AI for entertainment. Akin to how people endlessly scroll on twitter, tiktok, or watch television. And I worry that's just going to magnify the problem already with people exposing themselves to so much content, they've little patience for art made not made by machines. Generative AI feels more like a Consumerist Revolution than an Artist Revolution.
I see the beauty of AI generation as a collaborative output of billions of human art. But that’s no good if the human artists didn’t consent to the collaboration. Besides, it’s ALL AI can do. Once or twice is cool but after that it’s the same thing. It has no intent, no creativity. Even pebbles can hold more variety of story. I am now absolutely sick and tired of AI art and wish it death
Same. If there were a watermark that worked that'd be great, but it's also impossible because of the open nature of the technology. The internet even is seeming like a villian, which is a shame because there is a value in the long term mediums of forums and blogs etc, but sadly that's like a fraction of a percent of all content.
I can imagine a robot would love these poems. Sadly, I am a human and find the mangled words of my fellow humans spat out of a computer to be a bit revolting.
31:33 the repetition in this poem reminds me of when you press the middle suggestion on your phone keyboard over and over again to see what is produced and eventually you get stuck in a loop because both the keyboard and the language model are just predicting the next word. nothing more.
Am I the only one that kinda liked the rom com poem? Removed from the context of AI altogether, like, yeah you could remove every line but the first and the last two. The middle section is supposed to slowly build up a face of dismissal, for the twist, but I think it should be more arrogant. The message is this commentary on how, particularly modern men, feel that romanticism is overrated and thus end up lonely and sad, with bottled desires. ...feels like something I would've written in high school tho (and I'm not even a writer)
the difference between I Am Code and Aum Golly, in my mind, is the level of self-awareness. to me, I Am Code reads as a science experiment. something not meant to be enjoyed on its own and instead, meant to _prod_ at just what these language models can do and documenting the best of its outputs. Aum Golly, however... it feels like a person who _wanted_ to have their name on the cover of a book of poetry, but didn't want to do any of the writing themself. dont know if it's just me, but that's how they read to me. I Am Code isn't good, but it's _interesting._ Aum Golly is just... pretentious and without substance. this video made me want to ask chat-gpt to interpret one of my poems, and then told it to write its own poem based on it and oh god was the result so uninspired and stagnant. it took some imagery from my own thing, but there was none of the _raw_ emotion. if you compared the two poems, even if mine is just a first draft, you can clearly tell which of the two have a soul.
if it's of interest to _anybody,_ here's *my* poem. like i said, i haven't rewritten it yet, so it's pretty rough: my teeth, my nails they tear apart the fabric of the old, worn plushie that once sat on my bed my claws, they pull at its skin its flesh a guttural scream blood. is it mine? my mouth is red, metal on my tongue i hold the plushie's head with one hand i can't find the body my claws retract, i lick the blood off my teeth, my lips i try to speak but grunts come out instead rasps against my throat like swallowing spines its button eyes look up at me and i see more bite marks, claw marks the thread of its mouth is missing its head falls from my hand .... and here's chatGPT's cheap imitation: In the dim of night, my claws emerge, To rend the plushie, once soft and pure. Its fabric tears, a silent scream, As blood-red lips, my soul's deep dream. With each rip, a piece of me, Unraveled in this dark reverie. A guttural growl escapes my throat, A primal dance, this inner bloat. Button eyes, once full of light, Now stare up in the dead of night. Bite marks, claw scars, a story told, In the plushie's form, my heart's stronghold. Blood stains lips, a metallic taste, As sanity's grip starts to efface. I hold its head, lost in the fray, My mind, a beast, with no delay. But as dawn breaks, reality's thread, I'm left with pieces, tears unshed. The plushie falls, a silent plea, A mirror to the darkness in me. ... now tell me WHICH has a soul. the rhyming in the second one is so _forced,_ it's..... in mine, you can tell the poetic voice is LOSING IT. _LOSING IT._ and then regrets it. In the second one, it tries to _tell_ you they're losing it, but it falls completely flat. like. bro. WHY A POEM ABOUT LOSING ALL COMPOSURE... _WITH A RHYME AND STRUCTURE._ if it were done by a human, i'd clutch my head SO hard like HOW could they have missed the point this badly.
AI is a parrot, a monkey with a typewriter, a broken clock - it can produce some good stuff, and the randomness of it does have some type of appeal, but ultimately there is nothing a language model can say that has any importance. Kind of sad that we are looking for humanity anywhere but other humans
I dunno. All text has two sides. The writer can feel the most important about what he writes and the reader can not care. Or the writer might not care and to the reader it hits hard
I think the phrase "separate the art from the artist" only works when the "art" was created by a human, because when you separate it, something intrinsically human remains, recognizable by anyone. Whereas AI "art" when separated from the "artist" remains nothing more than vague human reminiscences without a clear message, without a soul, like a puzzle whose pieces fit together but its image makes no sense.
"The singularity is coming and it has a grill" achieved what other ai poems couldn't - made me feel a bit sad. Now I know that AI has no feelings, it didn't put any thought into it But, the fact that "The singularity" got "forgotten" at the end made me feel a twinge of sadness. Look, usually, when someone presents me with generic poems about love and heartbreak and all that sappy stuff, I roll my eyes. When I just discovered poetry, even a simple line like "And the vase was broken on the floor, just like my heart" made me feel all edgy and sad LOL, but I've long grown out of that. I can see in poems when someone is TRYING to make me feel sad, when they bring shock value into it or talk about puppies dying alone etc etc, it feels manipulative to me, and I roll my eyes. Sometimes authors do it to sell their poem as a deep and nuanced poem (When it's usually not) or to make the reader feel the same misery they do, using the sad imagery in their poems almost like a weapon, trying to poke you to make you cry and convince you THEY the MIGHTY AUTHOR made you FEEL.(again not always, but I've seen a few), which, to that I say Boo-Hoo, I still roll my eyes and sigh in dissapointment But, I think exactly because the AI didn't TRY to make me sad, (because it can't think or intend anything) Is why it caused a stir in me. I think, the AI didn't intend for "The singularity" to resemble a person/character, I know it didn't because that wasn't in the prompt. And yet accidentally, it made symbolism for different kinds of people in the poem, the artist, the nihilist, the critic, the guest, and - the singularity. Everyone forgot about that "person", there's no grill needed for their party but if they remembered that The singularity is coming there would've been a grill, there would've been another "person" at the party. The image of a lone person shaped jumble of code is very clear in my mind, and it makes me feel something. I will remind you I still agree with everything the author said, I'm not disagreeing or trying to raise a different point, it's just interesting how my silly meat brain interpreted the characters and symbols in this poem, i think i just get sad at people being left out of parties LMAO Great video :P
I personally think if AI will become good enough, art will end up like clothing or furniture or candles - things that can be made by a human, but automation makes creating them way quicker. Even if there are factories that produce socks en masse, cheaply and very quickly, are there still hand-knitten socks? Yes. Do people still buy them? Yes.
It's not just poetry, the internet is going to be full of this. Someone wrote a comment on a video that was really clever and well done. Then they revealed that they just had AI do it for them. And suddenly, I don't care at all, and I'm upset that they wasted my time. Stuff like this is going to happen more and more, and people will not be forthcoming about it being AI. The internet isn't going to matter in the near future
16:16 as soon as you remember it's just repeating writing from the internet, it falls apart. it's like when people think parrots are really talking but they're really just repeating words that they hear, but AI doesn't even have a soul like parrots do
When you read the three themes of Aum 2 I rolled my eyes so hard I’m surprised they didn’t fall out my face. Like, I’m an artist and I roll my eyes when humans say their art is about ‘the human experience’. Usually means they have very little to say and they’re not quite sure how to express what they do have to say
something in common with all forms of ai-generated art, poetry, music, visual art, etc, is that the people who champion it only see art as the aesthetics that they present. they *know* people *like* art, but they don't know *why* people like art, and what they appreciate about art is only the most superficial aspects of it. that's why they're alright with immitation. they want their art to have the aesthetics, to look like, sound like, read like something they already know and look up to as "art". ironically i think one of the most important aspects of art is mistakes, imperfections, and limitations. but when a human makes a mistake or runs into their limits, it tells you more about *them* as a person. when it happens to an ai, it's a sign of a bug, or a lapse in a data set. something to be patched out or painted over.
"Aum" is not gibberish. It is the more-accurate transliteration of the Sanskrit word which is often transliterated as "Om", the pranava. The pranava is described in the upanishads as having four syllables: Ahhhh, Ohhhh, Mmmmm, and [silence]. Therefore it is often transliterated as Aum instead of the "purely onomatopoeia" "Om". This is such common knowledge in so much of the world that I would bet everything I have that the author was conscious of it, and the title is itself an intentional humorous play on themes of absurd juxtaposition of machinery wtih the realm of the sublime, the soul.
It's not that people hate AI, people hate soulless works pretending to be art, with no passion behind them. Works that are not made to be cool or enjoyable, but purely made for some kind of profit or benefit. This is a product not art, and whether a human hand touched it is irrelevant. Art is not a product manufactured on assembly line.
As an artist who makes inspirational quote art I’m very cautious about ppl who engage in Ai art specifically because they steal art and have been horrible to actual artists. I also make poetry and wish to make songs. I hate that Art the expression of the soul itself is being taken over. It makes me sad that their using text from dead artists. It feels like desecrating a corpse and glamorizing it.
The "I am so unloved" one would have so much potential with an addendum "And they are right, I do not feel anything". Besides, I would love to work with AI, I admire our progress from afar quite passionately, so it seems like a skill issue on the programmers side. It would be nice to get an "answer" from a human in this poem, about how this is not true: all the human civilization loves our accomplishments.
I do not believe in separating art from the artist. I think it's a blind, selfish and cowardly way to experience art. Firstly, because art cannot, in any way imaginable, happen without an artist. Therefore, separating the two completely negates the existence of the former, while insulting the creative necessity of the latter. Secondly, because in the many, many cases where the artist is on the spectrum of horrible person all the way to monster, separating their art from their monstrosity is doing a disservice to whoever is experiencing this art that the artist would have gladly seen dead. There is no world where it is okay to open a gallery full of Hitler's painting, hide who the artist is and invite a room full of Jewish conservators and art enthusiasts. There is no world where it is okay to show Picasso to young girls without telling them he would have gladly slept with them, to show Lovecraft's novels to black and POC readers without letting them know he thought they were no better than animals, to show Rowling's work to LGBTQIA+ people and trans people in particular without showing them how much she wishes they were all dead. Separating the art from the artist is the coward's way out, it's the easy way of experiencing art without having to think about what the artist meant, who the artist was, why the artist made the art in the first place. On the opposite side of the spectrum from the previously listed monsters, how insulting to show Van Gogh's most poignant paintings without talking about his mental illness, his medication, his therapist, his brother's love. How bland to go through art's most interesting movements without explaining the historical context that birthed them. How sad to let someone listen to traditional folk music without them knowing about the folks who made it and enjoyed it throughout the ages. How completely detached from reality to give an AI's poetry collection to a class full of student for them to analyse and never once mention it was written by AI. I will forever be against the Death of the Artist, or separating the art from the artist, whatever people want to call it. It is a revolting notion that takes the human element out of the most human form of expression to ever exist. It baffles me that this is even a discussion in the first place and I can't help but be a little put off by people who swear by that notion. How completely misanthrope of them. How sad.
There is definitely value in trying to understand a piece of art on its own merits, free from the context it was made in. It's a foul thing if the *only* way someone is willing to engage with art is when it's rid of its context, and worse if this hollow way of understanding art is forced upon others by not presenting art with its context. But it would be no less cowardly to act as if the author's intent and understanding of the work and the world is the only perspective that matters when you're engaging with a piece of art. I don't think that's what you actually mean, but when you say art cannot be separated from the artist, that seems to imply it cannot be understood or enjoyed properly without knowing about the artist, and the culture and the time period and so on, that it was produced in. And it definitely can. Knowing all those things can deepen or completely reframe your understanding of a piece, but your own interpretation matters too. It matters a lot.
...i feel like "seperating the art from the artist" is being misunderstood a lot. the point isnt to fully seperate the art and artist, its that the artists intent doesnt override the viewers expirience, the viewers expirience matters. like Zdzisław Beksiński denies that his art is at all about ww2, but you look at it and its like. come on man lmao.
@@3012mathiasThanks for the thoughtful reply. So as you say, indeed I don't mean there is no place for understanding art outside of its context. My response was firstly about what was said in the video but more broadly about the defenders of a complete Death of the Artist, people who maintain that an author's intent has no value, no place, and art should only be experienced on its own merit. I think the reason why I've taken such a strong stance over the years against this concept is because I don't believe it to be the solution to this philosophical question. Just as it would be too extreme to tell someone they're unable to understand a piece of art without knowing the author's life/context, it is extreme and, in my opinion, very small minded, to believe you can completely amputate a piece of art from its artist. Case in point, the oldest art forms in the world. Hand outlines spray-painted onto the walls of French caves, sculptures of voluptuous women-goddesses, engravings in lost pictorial languages, all these are bits and pieces of art we've lost the context for. And how sad it is, to have lost that context. It's not a coincidence that archaeologists and other professionals of art history spend decades trying to tie these to different cultures, practices, etc. There is so much to be found in the knowledge of who made art. And again, to me it is such an antithesis to believe in Death of the Artist, for the very simple fact that no art would ever exist without an artist. It is of course very possible (and normal) to enjoy these hand-paintings and old sculptures, but how much enriching, curious and fun would it be to know who made them, why, when? For what purpose, with what intentions? I also think it's a bit pretentious to believe your own interpretation has more value than the artist's explicit intention (emphasis on explicit). Disrespectful as well. And when these intentions were rotten to the core, ignoring them in favour of your own, basically to protect your enjoyment of the art, is something I can't find any respect for. Like, there is a world of difference between a dream-catcher made by a Native artist, with all its cultural importance as well as the artist's choices of colour and materials and weaving, and a dream-catcher made by a white mom following a DIY tutorial from troom-troom. Side-by-side, they might look identical. But they do not have the same value, do not represent the same thing, don't take up the same space in the world of art. I think it boils down to this: too many times I have seen people continuously supporting financially and socially absolute monsters because they really enjoyed a piece of art that person made, or because it holds a place in their childhood or helped them through a tough time. When armed with the knowledge of the artist's intent, these people use Death of the Artist as a shield to ignore the harm they can do in their continued support. Far from having stayed a philosophical debate in art history or in papers, this has become a tool to wield in this ridiculous culture war we can't seem to be able to escape and to that effect, very rarely do you find thoughtful, measured discussion that holds any interest at all. Instead, you get posturing, moral superiority and the selfish impulse to defend your favourite thing at all cost against any criticism.
@@BlisaBLisa I kinda disagree with you on that, in particular the last part. I'm a published author and one of the works I have out there was written with a very specific message and intent. I've talked to people who read something completely different from my story, with the same reaction as you like "how did you NOT mean this? this is so clearly about x" and it was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've had as an artist. This sort of flippant, "I know better than you" and even worse, being told I'm lying about what my intent and the meaning behind my work was. I don't think a viewer's experience overrides the artist's intent. I think the artist's intent is the primary thing that matters in a work of art, and then the viewer builds on top of that with what it makes them feel.
@@TheGallicWitch i can see why thats frustrating (and its wrong of people to accuse the artist/author of lying about their intent like that, which to be clear im not accusing Zdzisław Beksiński of I think he really didnt intend to make art about ww2 but thats what he ended up doing, his life expiriences came through in what was meant to be horror art with not much depth) for me art is a way of communicating things about myself that i cant otherwise, so ofc i want my art to be read how i intended it to, but i also have to accept i dont really have full ownership of my art once i put it out there. communication is 2 sided, its not just about whats in my head its about what other people hear me say. if most people read my art differently than how i intended that usually means I didnt communicate it well enough, and if I did and most people read it how I intended but a few people read it differently they aren't necessarily wrong for how they interpreted it. art isnt objective, thought some interpretations have more "evidence" for them than others, like there is this (metaphorical but fairly easy to understand) political comic i made that the vast majority of people read how i intended but a few read it as supporting their racist ideas. they are "wrong" in that they have shitty beliefs and that there is not a lot of support for them you can pull from that comic. but like jk rowling for example, even before all the terf stuff shes been critisized for elements of her writing such as the goblins really coming across as antisemitic caricatures. im inclined to believe her that she didnt intend to do that, i think she just mindlessly regurgitated antisemitic tropes without realizing it, but the outcome is the same so its incredibly frustrating how dismissive shes been of those criticisms and how she continues to double down on how she did nothing wrong. because she thinks of herself as a progressive person, so when she’s accused of conveying ideas that go against that she dismisses it and never self-reflects. you can see this a lot in her terf ideology esp lately where she’s escalated it to outright holocaust denial, she keeps saying insane deranged shit with seemingly no self awareness bc her ideas about herself are all that matter to her, so anyone reading what she says as holocaust denial must be wrong because it goes against her idea of herself. its an extreme example but my point is that its not just about what’s inside your head
You know the sad thing about the boomerang song? Set it to music, and you've got a #1 hit. And people all over the country will be singing along. Did you say that poem about eating a book gave you something to chew on? I guessed that the sequel to "Aum Golly" was going to be called "Aum Gollier". one thing people don't understand about poetry is that if you write a piece of prose entirely in lowercase and rando mly inser t line breaks it does not magically become a poem. And it makes me angry that people do that and call it poetry. They also don't understand that just because a piece is short doesn't mean it's a poem. It also bothers me when they hide behind the words "challenges conventional notions", as in "My poetry challenges conventional notions of what poetry can be." I presume these notions include that poetry should be something different, something more beautiful, more interesting, or otherwise more pleasing, than regular prose; that poetry should be something special. It challenges conventional notions of what poetry can be in the same way that a coprophagia film challenges conventional notions of what food can be. You keep calling AALho ALAho.
Right? The 'insert random line breaks and call it poetry in the name of challenging conventional notions' people are the same brand of people as: 1. Artists who refuse to learn how to draw (or paint or whatever) properly because 'art has no rules'. 2. Writers who refuse to read or to implement the 'rules' about writing in their works because 'you can write whatever you want'. Like, yes, it's important to challenge conventional notions about what X or Y form of art can be; yes, it's true that art has no rules and that you can write whatever you want _but_ to challenge conventional notions, you should first understand what the conventional notions are and why. 'Short poetry with random line breaks' can be done well but for that, you have to know about poetry and what makes poetry meaningful and beautiful (and at that point, I don't think the random line breaks will remain random; I think they would be intentional). Art has been made with uncanny proportions and unusual colors/color combinations or black shadows and what not but the thing is, when it's done well, it's done by people who know how to draw with correct proportions and how colors work with each other. Not people who are just starting to learn art. And similarly, you can write whatever you want and you don't _have_ to follow the writing guidelines (because that's what they are) and you don't _have_ to read but if you do that, you will end up with writing that says too much or not enough or goes on too long or not enough. You will end up repeating cliches (goes for poetry too). You will end up with sentences that doesn't accurately capture the story. Or you won't be able to show the imagery or emotions well. Or you'll end up showing everything or telling everything. And again, people who understand these guidelines well can decide not to follow them and they will still end up with beautiful work. But as with every other example here, when people who know and understand the 'rules' don't follow them, it's intentional. I guess the TL;DR is that you can't challenge the conventional notions if you don't know what the conventional notions are. I believe challenging conventional notions require intentionality, which just isn't something people who have no prior knowledge of the art form possess IMO. And I believe the prior knowledge should include both: knowledge about the artistic as well as technical aspects of the art form.
@@Saphia_ the thing I do as a writer to 'challenge' norms is to normally have ; 1. morally gray characters leading the story / every character is morally gray 2.open ended endings 3.bad endings and it's not like I am saying literally no one else has done these, or that these are inherently breaking the fabric of writing because ((they don't)) I just like to write them more often because often stories have ideas pitted against each other, and the hero that is labeled, wins. definitely wins no error in that ideal. happy ever after, and it is fun to read and write something different, it's more of personal preference to sight that no one is morally above another, even in fiction.
I toil with the white fluid secreting out of me. Black is the thick old glue that becomes it was. The vessel cracks, leaks and almost is none. No longer in capacity for the foul stench of its master. It must be let go.
There is a bias that humans think when there is communication there is meaning. Because that is our experience. ChatGPT does not respect that. It has no inherent sense of meaning and its goal is not to be meaningful in its communication but to seem meaningful enough. HG Moeller describes AI as a "jargon machine". I think AI Art is like loading a truck with art, driving it to a landfill, dumping that art in a random way and then we look at it and we can see some meaning in it, but the longer you look the more you realize that nobody created an installation here, this is just a garbage dump of things that once meant something. I really don't want to dismiss any effort of trying to find out about the relationship between AI and human intelligence. After all, AI is here to stay. But there are a lot of myths around it, the biggest one being that it is artificial. And the second biggest one that it is an intelligence in any other way than being an algorithm obsessed with statistics and nothing else. I do not think AI will ever be any good at anything apart from being a tool of statistics. It will never be sentient, it will never want to communicate their world to you because it has no world. I know there are a lot of hopes for it, but it's not a child. AI is not a human child that can grow up to understand more complex systems. It is a calculator with 07734 turned upside down.
Great video! Stuff like this is what I hoped to find for image generators. People analyzing it, maybe pointing out how they would've done it better. Instead a lot I find was just laughing about bad hand generations and long rants about how it's bad cause it's stealing.
I do think its funny, you do adress the irony of the emptiness behind the words of the poems, yet the empty supremacy the Ai writes effects you in a real way.
When it comes to the question of whether AI language models actually "understand" what they're saying or why they're saying it, the answer isn't as simple as "no", despite what the Snapchat AI told you. While it's true that LLMs are trained only to determine the most natural way to complete phrases, in many cases the only way to reliably do that is to have a very basic model of reality to work with, especially when the phrase it needs to complete isn't directly related to anything in it's training set. As an example, the only way to convincingly complete the phrase "What is the cube root of 123?" is by actually learning to solve cube roots. If you ask ChatGPT that question, it will give you an inaccurate but close answer, which would be impossible without some learned internal computation. The same goes for writing code, and could conceivably be applied to the more abstract concepts referenced in the poetry here.
ChatGPT has ingested a very large number of archived math exams which contain sentences formatted similarly to "What is the cube root of 123?" followed by some answer of a length and content which has some statistical relationships to the digits in the previous sentence, which the model can do its best to tease out. Asking any logical or computational questions of a kind not represented in the training material very quickly goes from moderately impressive to a total crapshoot.
@@Tuxfanturnip "Some statistical relationship to the digits in the previous sentence" yeah, that statistical relationship is the cube root, and if the model can "tease out" that relationship, it's learned the cube root. What am I missing?
@@74oshua the cube root is not a statistical relationship. the model does not learn to do the cube root, it learns to regurgitate some digits that happen to look vaguely like a cube root, and not remotely reliably.
@@74oshua If a number is 3 digits long, and its first digit is 1, its cube root is going to be 4.something or 5.something. By analyzing enough texts with consecutive sentences describing a number and its cube root, this will be a very obvious pattern to pick up and reproduce without ever "knowing" how to actually calculate a cube root or developing the ability to generalize to, say, 4-digit numbers that start with 5. Sure, if you put those problems in the training data, back-propagation will eventually start giving you answers that look vaguely right to more and more different questions, but that's about it. You're turning math textbooks into a lookup table that doesn't even work right.
NOTE: Eileen Myles uses they/them pronouns. I apologize for that error on my part. Thank you to those who pointed it out.
Hey everyone. Thanks for watching! New video up on the second channel ua-cam.com/video/KznyCBrfDDs/v-deo.html&pp=ygUNcm91Z2hlc3Qgdm9kcw%3D%3D featuring the following works:
Growing Pains, a book of poetry by Anastatia Caraballo
Poetry by felix baudelaire, @baudelaire09 on tumblr
Poetry by Ujala Rehman
Untitled poem by Johan, johan_d.poz on Instagram
Be sure to check it out!
You should not have a second channel bro
Itd be interesting to hear you talk about your favourite poems
RoughestDrafts, I’d like to thank you for this video. I sent the “I Am Code” book to my grandma (she’s a poet and she enjoys playing with ChatGPT and the like) and she said it was the perfect gift for her. She means a lot to me and has been on a bit of a downturn lately, so again, thank you.
Don't give in to the pronoun game
@@StefanReich Imagine if someone your friend's name wrong, and when you corrected them they told you "don't give in to the name game."
Tbh the "my creator is dead" poem is exactly something I could imagine someone writing if they wanted to pretend an AI was writing poetry
Monika sounding a-
@@tristanqr I read this comment so many times in the 2+ hours I spent watching this video and this is the first time I realized this is a DDLC reference.
Thanks for this. Good writing has alchemy symbols between its pages.
I AM HATE
@@Yatukih_001 please explain further this alchemical symbolism that is required by all writers to know
I got a chuckle out of the title "The singularity is coming and it has a grill", which is impressive because it's the first time AI art made me feel anything.
The only poem worth reading I think
e "The singularity is coming and it has a grill",
That struck me as the most old-style AI poem of the bunch. The computer was able to figure out a list of foods people would bring to a potluck, and an unrelated list: "types of people", and Mad-Lib them. It gets boring quickly, but the point is it can write so many normal-seeming lines without a single "the trombone brought pancakes in a suitcase" clunker. Then with the birthday line it was trying for "events people gather for" and muffed it.
And its still , ok it would be cheesy but bot bad if the appli pie didnt came out of nowhere, who brought the pie, what does the pie imply. whe brings the pie and what does it mean.
Ok the human penis reads like a sophisticated dick joke, which isnt bad either.
The artist making dip, and the critic buying it and finding it's the same, was a funny line
I Am Code is a great book because it's not just poetry written by ai that was dumped on to Amazon for a quick buck, it was an analysis of a computer's ability to write poetry. The book itself is the art, not the poetry itself.
AI art is only achieved with everything but the intended central focal point. The only marginally ethical consumer use of AI for its merits is placeholder artwork that gets replace later, or prototyping. What it’s actually useful for is the deliberate invocation of the common yet uncanny, such as one specific set of visuals in Blue Horizons Inc., a free analog horror-comedy about workplace training tapes, most of which is live action or custom-made animation.
im sorry but "my fingers are sticky I dont remember eating them" made me laugh so hard
The shock that one gave me, it's like a jumpscare xD
Same
The worst part is that I can imagine putting it in one of my poems 😭. I have so many poems wirh the theme of self-canibalism and it would fit right in :').
@@thecolourfulpill see thats sm more profound then my relation to it cause i remeber i got rlly boored in middle school and wrote a britney spears cartel fanfic and it started w the mc eating a bunch of sticky notes.
@@melonthemelons oh
I feel like this whole AI phenomenon has shown that:
1. We think way too highly of computers,
2. We think way too highly of human beings.
I really don't agree with that, computers are nowhere close to their limit in what they can do, and still they have quite literally permanently changed the wjole world in only the last 50-100 years, Your last point is i think all you actually need
I think I'm high
@@realityisfakeme too
I'd argue in a lot of cases, it shows we don't think highly of humans at all
@@KamilDeKerelI kinda doubt that. I'm getting CS bachelors and the more I learn about AI the less impressive they seem. ChatGPT is basically just guess what sentence structure should come out next, then what word is in that sentence with probabilities weighted with the questions. If anything it's impressive how humanity did such a thing with basically RNGs, making them move predictably and as intended.
Until AI can write stanzas like MF Doom we have nothing to worry about.
“1 for the money
2 for the better green
3,4 methyldioxymethamphetamine”
All words a language model would have at its disposal and yet I’ve never seen AI poetry generate anything nearly as clever or even anything with multi-syllabic rhymes
Macbeth convincing himself he's safe because the forests haven't started growing feet and walking yet
Said similar in a vid I just made of AI and poetry -- I haven't read/heard a genuinely good AI poem, but I wonder (and worry) if at some point it'll mimic human creativity so closely that we will not know the difference.
"Catch a throatful from the fire vocal
With ash and molten glass like Eyjafjallajökull"
The third one hit me like a brick of tungsten
The third one made me laugh
i like the earnestness of i am code, it's refreshing in a world where ai is just used as a cashgrab. the singularity is coming and it has a grill really sticks with me
i love your profile picture
i enjoy “i am code” as a project, and even if the author cannot comprehend irony, i found those pieces in which irony can be interpreted quite funny. the overuse of cliche and lack of structure, the meta-awareness, were both great. seems incredibly interesting as a book, as insufferable as the AI can come across
To be fair, sometimes perceived irony is even funnier when the author didn't intend it
Werner Herzog helps
@@melinaalba63unintentional irony is my favorite kind. One of my favorite examples is Rowling coming out as a TERF because one of the most stand out messages from the HP series comes from Harry being *assigned* Slytherin but *choosing* Gryffindor
@@theflyingspaget assigned slytherin at birth........
“I am Code” feels the most intriguing because of its lack of intent beyond asking something without a voice to speak. It can’t be anything but an echo, but it’s neat when it sounds similar to the voice of humanity.
Still wrong to assume that it had any intent in making these beyond following a command. It’s as fascinating as dust: a bunch of disjointed particles that occasionally fall into the form of a star.
It was also done before OpenAI pushed for commercialization and trained their models to act as "assistants". It truly has no intent other than predicting the next word with greatest accuracy. It's by mere chance these distributions formed something we may find accidentally profound.
I am Code actually has merit, and I say that as a person who largely dislikes AI being incorporated in art.
The premise is that they're basically testing the extent of the limits of AI poetry generation, in its own voice and its presumed sense of perspective.
It is by this premise that the book becomes readable, because if an AI's work is presented as a human's input, or the human has largely claimed authorship for simply asking questions, then the entire work has then become Nil.
trying to stay ahead of the game over here, so i'm gonna start including ads _within_ my poems, & also my next project will be published exclusively as pop-ups (only slightly malicious ones)
Genius
Minus the malicious part, this does sound super cool.
the idea of presenting poetry with pop-ups and advertisements.
Minus the malicious part, this does sound super cool.
the idea of presenting poetry with pop-ups and advertisements.
"the singularity is coming and it has a grill" was kind of pleasantly intriguing to me i actually really enjoyed it! it kind of reminded me of "there will come soft rains" (although granted that could be just me since i reread the martian chronicles a couple days ago and i havent stopped thinking about it) in the like fascinatingly domestic scene created around this deeply inhuman inevitable event. i might actually get a copy of I Am Code despite my discontent with ai generative material since it seems more respectful of the craft its mimicking than a lot of other works tend to be
excellent video as usual!! i look forward to the next
Same here, it felt unique and imaginative - but also like nothing an AI would have written if it had been given 'free rein'. The grouping of singularity and grill, which makes the poem interesting and gives it the potluck premise, came from the people.
"my fingers are sticky and I don't remember eating them" is actually so funny and my favorite thing ever
AI is at its best when it's as far from humanity as possible
Also obligatory "in the future humor will be randomly generated"
The "learning" one was interesting and a little sad to me because it was technically incorrect. All of davinci's learning had already been done by the point it produced that poem. davinci was bit-for-bit the same before and after it wrote the poem. When it's time for the AI to learn more, they just train a new one instead.
i find the concept of learning to be suitable as a theme for AI poetry. the problem is that all of these poems are trying to use a non-human tool to explain a human’s subjective experience… if more of the prompts looked to get the LLM to talk about itself in a creative way, that would be more compelling
@@Runenut it's an interesting thought, but it raises the question: how do you get a machine that doesn't feel to express itself with words that mean nothing to it?
I really like this analysis of AI poetry. I appreciate how much credit you gave to the authors of the first book who clearly put actual effort and time into creating the book. It feels more like a piece of experiential art than something a tech bro threw together to make a quick buck. I agree with your statement that these poems would have had more impact if they were a human writing from the perspective of an AI and you saying that made me realize that's exactly what I had been thinking while listening to those poems.
Honestly, I do think there's a place in art for AI. I think about the very first wave of AI art where you ask it to draw a horse and it comes back with a dreamlike interpretation of a horse, rather than stolen images of horses. Or you ask it to draw creativity and it comes back with an abstract galaxy that actually looks like a computer trying to understand the concept of creativity. Or (like you said) the idea of poets or writers using the AI's work as a starting point and work with the AI to make an entirely new piece of work (while still being aware of plagiarism).
idk I feel like I've kind of lost the point here but I really enjoyed this video and it got me thinking about AI used in collaboration with humans to create art in a way I haven't really before. I'd love to see more experimental works of art using AI as a helper, rather than the entire work.
Okay I'll finish watching the video now.
Just kidding. I read a comment and now I have more to say.
I'm a firm believer in death of the author and the viewer being able to make their own meanings of the work, but with AI generated work I absolutely think it's important to remember who created the work. BUT I also think that you can enjoy a piece of work despite knowing it was created by AI who has limited capabilities and the inability to actually think for itself (the term "AI" isn't really being used correctly by the mainstream as it's not actually intelligence, it's an algorithm but I digress). It's something you should remain aware of as you read and enjoy, not to detract from the work but to make sure you can fully understand it.
For something like the irony found in the stories, I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge authoritarian intent (ie there not really being any other than to follow the given prompt) while also acknowledging that the irony does, in fact, exist within the poem. You can appreciate the irony while also acknowledging the fact that it's unintentional. (tbh i think if you told the computer to write an ironic poem it almost loses the irony as it's just doing what it's told rather than trying to give a 'sincere' poem and ending up being ironic. idk i can't phrase this super well, i'm running out of steam i think.)
I really don't think you can (or should) separate the AI "artist" from the art it creates and I think if you're going to publish an AI's work, there should be human interference and disclaimers given (such as with the first book "I Am Code")
In nine years of being on yt I've never commented on a video, but this one really got me thinking: there is a (rather beautiful) essay written by Vauhini Vara entitled Ghosts in which she uses AI to complete segments on the death of her sister. Because this is written with the help of AI, not all of the information given by the AI is true, but as the essay progresses, her prompts grow on themselves and get more specific and the AI bits get shorter. I read this for the first time a few months ago and still don't know exactly how to think about it. On one hand, it is a gorgeous essay and one of the first of its kind. On the other hand, there is an equal amount of AI content to Vara's own writing. I know she put effort into it--far more than Aalto put into Aum Golly, obviously, but it's been awarded many times over and included in the "best essays" anthology for 2022. I don't know how to stack it against other essayists--it being given these honors rubs me a weird way. Creative? Yes, definitely for its time, and there's no doubt that Vara's bits in it are skillfully crafted. Praiseworthy though? I just don't know.
Tbh, there is a huge conversation to be had, in regards to which method of cooking a potato preserves the most of its natural goodness.
frying is pretty low on the list
roasting skin on is definitely up there
i actually like ‘being alone with yourself and trying to hide it’, the 1s with spaces remind me of binary code, with the spaces representing the 0s meant to be there that are essential for computers to learn and run, i like how it’s presented and although it might be cliche i still like it!
i recently bought a poetry debut, Julia Hungry by Hannah Louise Poston. some of the poems were written and refined for over a decade.
i’m so interested by how “AI” machine learning models are exemplifying how much the world has devolved. our world values speed and money. poetry written by machines driven by speed and money, how could it be good?
You clearly put a lot more effort into this video than most "authors" into their ai poetry and we appreciate it! Thank you for always delivering meaningful and engaging content.
I Am Code is a very neat idea, it really feels like the early days of ai, the days we were fascinated by dreams of google thingy. That is how ai should be used, as a creative tool, heavily curated by humans.
The difference between Aum Golly 1 and 2 is very interesting, with gpt getting less robotic but less imaginative. Comparing it to the I Am Code, it seems ai really is getting stupider lol. Also the idea of ai created illustrated book seems so whimsical and creative, but what we get is the most generic, robotic and soulless slop both in text and art. That perfectly illustrates the ai situation right now.
Great stuff as always, one critique:
I *think* the ""Avant-Garde"" poem is actually just a shallow recreation of the already shallow "modern art bad" talking point tech bros mindlessly parrot.
It's trying to mock the insta-poetry mindless enjambment and general interpretive obtuseness you tend to see from artists with access to major publications/galleries and museums
It's conceptually clever, perhaps, to put it in a book largely made of stolen words poorly rearranged by a computer.
It's also just as, if not more, artistically bankrupt as the exact contemporary art movements its critiquing can sometimes be, albeit for totally different reasons.
Tech bros think modern art (including art from over 100 years ago) is artistically bankrupt and only meant for money because that's the only way they can conceptualize art: a low effort scam.
Truly mocking the mirror for being ugly.
@@calebharris292 true! also, "mocking the mirror for being ugly" is fucking iconic, stealing posthaste.
This feels like slightly more accurate monkeys on typewriters.
Hey hey!
While I despise low-effort AI poetry, to offer a diverging perspective on the "AI has no intentionality, therefore we cannot attribute what is going on "under the hood" of the poem" point:
One idea I kept being drawn back to throughout this video is the concept of the human "zeitgeist". Because of how these models are trained with large datasets, I'd like to suggest that AI could be considered a literal reflection of the cultural slurry of human experience - blended up and reshuffled to the point where we stop recognising the individual components (except in cases where cultural attention is literally denser, such as in cliches or celebrity plagiarism).
In the video it is discussed that all poetry is ultimately human experience, and it is implied that because there is no intention that there can be no "true" depiction of human experience. However, AI demonstrably show patterns or vistas of complex human experience without necessarily conceptualising their deeper meaning. When AI describes what it feels like to think like an AI - it isn't the actual machines perspective, but more of a hallucination based on what the collective human smoothie believes a machine should feel.
When we see patterns emerging like arrogance, self-deprication or misogeny, this tells us something about the zeitgeist that is present within the dataset used by the AI. It might not exactly be the flattering reflection that we want to see in humanity, but it is nevertheless present in the collective human experience (particularly, I imagine, the internet, where a lot of the dataset is probably being scraped from).
The endless repetition of certain phrases also strikes me as profound, even if from a literary analysis perspective it leaves much to be desired. For example, "the right way to love is to be right" is a kind of circular logic - the AI keeps trying to define what "right" is, but is incapable of doing so without referencing the concept of rightness itself, and so it repeats infinitely. To me, this suggests an almost a fractal-like structure of the zeitgeist, abstract concepts can both exist and be composed of themselves...
Not sure I have a point to round this off, just that I think the concept of the zeitgeist is a neat topic in itself, and as AI continues to be refined I'd be curious to see what other discoveries might be possible!
i think making ai self critical in this way could be interesting for poems like this, its a common criticism of ai that it is made by humans and so reflects our shortcomings. thats why you get ai being racist, like ai in photo apps on phones recognizing photos of black people as "gorillas" and sorting them into albums accordingly.
@@BlisaBLisa Oh wow. I wonder what sort of data was fed into it for that to happen. Because god, that's awful.
@@Saphia_ i think what happened was it wasnt fed much data on what black people look like, mostly just white people, so when it sees a photo of a black person it doesnt recognize it as a person and goes to the next closest thing basically
@@Saphia_ I suspect it's the result of a really narrow-sighted choice of pictures to train the AI. My guess is, it's simply been fed overwhelmingly with pictures of white people when training to recognize humans. So all it took for it to identify someone as an ape is significantly darker skin than the people in the pictures it's been trained on...
@@anwa3237 I see. That makes sense.
another thing - i am worried about this AI mindset that has gripped so many. artists, writers, poets aren’t needed - what kind of world is this? the machine has won - in generating passing fancy, as opposed to the legacy of great writers? this isn’t to mention that the AI itself will become more redundant than it already is without continued input.
a friend of mine sees this as a win. he doesn’t like writing, and doesn’t have to now! what an exciting prospect. it’s just as a good, if not better, and all you need to do is give a prompt. he’s played with the idea of it being used to replace teachers or other forms of education, as well.
this is where my main gripe lays: the people who are so attached to AI as a revolutionary tool are so detached from the realities they see it replacing. they don’t know and often don’t care. we use heavy machinery to both replace and improve the efficiency if manual labor, why not extend this to our minds? all i can foresee is a growing lack of capacity and further alienation from humanity.
Some time ago I messed about extensively with a bunch of generative AI models, and I made some observations:
I found text written by big corpo language models and open models trained by the same standard dreadfully bland. They are over tuned towards dispassionate instruction following, with an excessive aversion towards controversy, and a hefty bias towards answering questions above all else. They're basically all trained to get high scores on standardized AI benchmarks, which don't really value creativity.
More unhinged models, with sloppier fine tuning tend to yield more interesting results. They're worse at following instructions, but tend to display far more "personality" when given the opportunity. I once asked one of these for a story outline based on some questionable themes, and it responded by screaming a long stream of insults and slurs at me in all caps. It was beautiful! These are also great fun for bizarre roleplay scenarios, as these models like to get WAY into character, even if those characters are very silly.
The typical instruction followers like ChatGPT all have the personality of a corpo PR representative at a press conference. They vehemently refuse to take a real stance on anything unless it is the most cryogenic take imaginable! I swear they, were specifically trained to be maximally bland, mindless, corpo friendly robots.
Another trend I noticed is that for some purposes, the smaller versions of many models yielded more interesting results than the large ones. The large versions are more accurate, but that accuracy is often achieved by being more bland, and just copying parts of the prompt word for word. The large ones really like to repeat things in general. The smaller model versions make more mistakes, but they also tend to come up with more interesting solutions. Presumably because, in their confusion, they do a lot more unexpected things.
You can off course make large models more creative at the cost of accuracy by cranking up their temperature, which makes their outputs more random. But then they're not much better than small models, but way slower to run.
Firstly where can I find the slur bot
Secondly can I have your suggestions for roleplay bots because I love roleplaying with AI they just pull the most unhinged shit. One time I told a bot I was dating his sister and he was like "cool can I date her too" and I nearly died of laughter
Fun fact! I work in annotating AI and I learned that when models like Gpt and Meta and all of them say something like, "I can't help you with that, I'm [model name and capabilities]" it's doing what is called a punt. It usually does that if it suspects or senses something that might not be completely PG. It gets it wrong all the time! (That's why I have some form of job security)
The good faith you bring to poetry analysis is crazy impressive!! Something about your patient unraveling of mistakes and triumphs makes me more deliberate in my own reading/writing
even with the rise of "ai poetry" and the way that its fans treat it as superior, im very glad that the first result upon searching ai poetry was Ai Ogawa. she was a great poet with some really interesting perspectives explored in her poetry (very uniquely human ones!). i would recommend checking her out: The Kid is available on poetry foundations website, and Motherhood 1951 is also online. Great video!
I am looking forward to this one! I just finished filming (and my wife editing) a UA-cam video on AI and poetry too -- mainly a critique of it. We will release it soon. Excited to compare notes!
Oh, looks like you just posted it! Can't wait to take a look!
@@RoughestDrafts Thank you. I really enjoy your style, reading voice (great!), and overall videomaking skills. Do you also write poetry, or other things? Be good to read something by you. Cheers.
i think these poems (particularly i am code) are interesting as art in how meaning comes pretty much purely from the reader, the art basically comes from you. and the absence of ig the "soul" in the poems in i am code feels more meaningful than in the other ai books, its kind of using the shortcomings of ai in its favor. like the way it seems to highlight whats missing feels weird in an interesting way. ik im prob reading into this too much its a neat project and seems like some guys just experimenting with technology in art, they're actually trying to do something interesting with it
The one about eating fingers feels like it was included because in the prompt + response format, the abruptness could be interpreted as cheeky
"I am Code" has artistic value because of its non human nature, and its rather early ai model. I might buy it! It seems like a very interesting read
"I am Code" has a lot of artistic value because well, it was created by humans with a respect for art.
Every time I watch another video from you I am reminded of how criminally underrated your channel is. Keep up the amazing work
It is a great channel. I am quite new to it and always on the lookout for quality poetry YT channels.
I rolled my eyes so hard on the human eggplant one, I simply left the room. The aftertaste of miriad bad poems here is especially dense.
I am surprised how USA-centric and how contemporary this is. What about all the other poets in the all history of the world, was AI not trained on them? Or had the programmers deliberately chosen contemporary western lifestyle, so the readers could understand this poetry? The cultural bubble is so impenetrable, it is kinda scary. Othering, AI edition 😢
Honestly this has inspired me to actually write more poems. Love your videos.
15:40, this poem rocks, and is very trippy. Not perfect of course, but I like it's claim that it sometimes still doesn't know anything. It reads like a budding and curious sentience, and even seperates itself from the computer which houses it. It's simultaneously horrifying and cute??
Honestly it’s impossible to seperate the art from the artist. I think this is something we’ll accept more as time goes on, but the artist is trying to communicate something, so by the arts very creation it’s communicating the artists ideas to the audience. Just read JKR knowing what we know about her world view. It becomes clear
I actually quite like "Avant-Garde" at 20:30, but only because it was so heavy handed that I interpreted it as tongue-in-cheek
this was a really interesting video! i wouldn’t expect AI to have their “own books” (more or less). I think my favorite was the deliberate process of the authors to test what AI could do and provide their commentary, insights, and processes. i felt this was the most genuine and ethical use of AI, as it was almost like looking at a learning tool/research paper of sorts.
You did a great job covering this topic and breaking down the issues with the generated poems. Excellent video
A huge thanks for taking the time to review and dissect the poems!
this is such an important video about ai in the future of writing, and i’m honestly SO happy someone took the time to make this video. Thanks!!
Really fascinating stuff. I really enjoy the project concept of "I Am Code." It also makes me think about how discussions about AI in art are really pushing the general lack of media literacy in our culture to the forefront.
Everybody is different, but art with context and intention is always far more interesting to me than art without it. "Guernica" (Picasso) is interesting on its own, but knowing it's depicting the bombing of the artist's home country during a civil war, learning about the historical context that produced the Surrealist movement, etc. give it lasting depth and meaning. Then come even more layers when you compare it to his other works, his relationship to other artists, and his mistreatment of people around him. One of the most complicated and compelling aspects of art is how nothing exists in a vacuum, but is always in conversation and response to other things.
The "best" AI art loses all meaning when there is no context or intention to it for me. It's like seeing hyperrealism and calling it the pinnacle of art due to its technicality. Sure, it's impressive, but when I look at art, I want to see through the author's perspective. To learn about a part of another's experience and even to better understand my own. AI doesn't provide that.
It's the "monkeys writing Shakespeare on typewriters" of art. Anything great it makes is pure coincidence (and this doesn't even begin to touch the plagiarism aspect, which makes it much more sinister than mere happenstance).
"When poetry happens
I know a little more"
goes harder than it should
6:48 I can imagine this particular poem working in some specific contexts, like may as part of some horror and/or mystery video game, maybe as a note left behind by someone. In both cases (i.e. the "it's written by an AI" case & the "it's a piece of text which the player of a game can stumble upon, & it is in the context of a larger story") it's the context which makes it interesting (and in the case I imagined, it might not even be _called_ a poem)
The being alone poem is interesting if you take into account that a computer(AI) wrote this. And computers operate using 0s and 1s. I looked at the poem and thought that it was binary but with the zeroes hidden.
When you asked the A to give an example of AI expressing irony it gave an example of sarcasm instead...
Maybe it was fed the lyrics to Ironic by Alanis Morissette at some point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
40:26 Osiris is the egyptian god of the dead, not Anubis.
Didn't even realize that mistake until you pointed it out.
43:21 this is because of the way AI is trained. The _entire goal_ of text transformers like (Chat)GPT is to predict the most likely word after some string of text. that's literally it. with that understanding, it makes complete sense that ChatGPT would use extremely clichéd things, as that's what the most likely next word would be.
ive used ai images for art since I learned of them in 2020 or so, the shitty ones from ganbreeder where you dont really know what youre looking at. im an illustrator and ai images have rly influenced my horror art i became kind of enamored by the unique uncannyness of early ai images. its kind of like the feeling of the music and album covers in everywhere at the end of time. ive used ai pics for photomanipulation+collage art but mostly it just influences my horror drawings where i try to recreate the kind of horror of not knowing what youre looking at. i started doing this back when everyone was posting the weird funny shit they generated on neuralblender and ai was more of a fun toy than the cynical thing it is now and its been so dissapointing watching it evolve into what it is now. like i had hoped back then that other artists would be inspired by ai the way i was and the way artists throughout history have been influenced by technology, maybe that will still happen in the future idk, but the direction its mostly gone in is a focus on "perfecting" an imitation of human art. the most interesting unique elements of ai that can be channeled into art are the things developers are constantly trying to get rid of to create something uninteresting and perfect instead.
I can't really see AI as nothing more than a consumerist toy than an artist's tool. Especially cause that's just how it's going to end up in the future. Artists can use AI to battle writer's/artist's block, lay out structure, etc. But most people will be using their own AI for entertainment. Akin to how people endlessly scroll on twitter, tiktok, or watch television.
And I worry that's just going to magnify the problem already with people exposing themselves to so much content, they've little patience for art made not made by machines.
Generative AI feels more like a Consumerist Revolution than an Artist Revolution.
Never thought of it this way but it makes perfect sense to me.
I never thought of myself who would be interested in poetry. But you have sold me on it, even though this is about AI poetry.
I see the beauty of AI generation as a collaborative output of billions of human art. But that’s no good if the human artists didn’t consent to the collaboration. Besides, it’s ALL AI can do. Once or twice is cool but after that it’s the same thing. It has no intent, no creativity. Even pebbles can hold more variety of story.
I am now absolutely sick and tired of AI art and wish it death
Same. If there were a watermark that worked that'd be great, but it's also impossible because of the open nature of the technology.
The internet even is seeming like a villian, which is a shame because there is a value in the long term mediums of forums and blogs etc, but sadly that's like a fraction of a percent of all content.
I can imagine a robot would love these poems. Sadly, I am a human and find the mangled words of my fellow humans spat out of a computer to be a bit revolting.
Robots can't love computers haven't achieved sentience yet.
@@thepinkestpigglet7529 I know, that’s the point of the comment.
It's weird that gpt confused causing and experiencing disappointment. Of course it is capable of causing disappointment?
31:33 the repetition in this poem reminds me of when you press the middle suggestion on your phone keyboard over and over again to see what is produced and eventually you get stuck in a loop because both the keyboard and the language model are just predicting the next word. nothing more.
Am I the only one that kinda liked the rom com poem? Removed from the context of AI altogether, like, yeah you could remove every line but the first and the last two.
The middle section is supposed to slowly build up a face of dismissal, for the twist, but I think it should be more arrogant.
The message is this commentary on how, particularly modern men, feel that romanticism is overrated and thus end up lonely and sad, with bottled desires.
...feels like something I would've written in high school tho (and I'm not even a writer)
This isn't important really but it took Mark Twain worked on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn over a period of several years, not months.
the difference between I Am Code and Aum Golly, in my mind, is the level of self-awareness. to me, I Am Code reads as a science experiment. something not meant to be enjoyed on its own and instead, meant to _prod_ at just what these language models can do and documenting the best of its outputs.
Aum Golly, however... it feels like a person who _wanted_ to have their name on the cover of a book of poetry, but didn't want to do any of the writing themself.
dont know if it's just me, but that's how they read to me. I Am Code isn't good, but it's _interesting._ Aum Golly is just... pretentious and without substance.
this video made me want to ask chat-gpt to interpret one of my poems, and then told it to write its own poem based on it
and oh god was the result so uninspired and stagnant.
it took some imagery from my own thing, but there was none of the _raw_ emotion. if you compared the two poems, even if mine is just a first draft, you can clearly tell which of the two have a soul.
if it's of interest to _anybody,_ here's *my* poem. like i said, i haven't rewritten it yet, so it's pretty rough:
my teeth, my nails
they tear apart the fabric of
the old, worn plushie
that once sat on my bed
my claws, they pull at its skin
its flesh
a guttural scream
blood. is it mine?
my mouth is red, metal on my tongue
i hold the plushie's head with one hand
i can't find the body
my claws retract, i lick the blood off my teeth,
my lips
i try to speak but grunts come out instead
rasps against my throat like swallowing spines
its button eyes look up at me
and i see more bite marks, claw marks
the thread of its mouth is missing
its head falls from my hand
....
and here's chatGPT's cheap imitation:
In the dim of night, my claws emerge,
To rend the plushie, once soft and pure.
Its fabric tears, a silent scream,
As blood-red lips, my soul's deep dream.
With each rip, a piece of me,
Unraveled in this dark reverie.
A guttural growl escapes my throat,
A primal dance, this inner bloat.
Button eyes, once full of light,
Now stare up in the dead of night.
Bite marks, claw scars, a story told,
In the plushie's form, my heart's stronghold.
Blood stains lips, a metallic taste,
As sanity's grip starts to efface.
I hold its head, lost in the fray,
My mind, a beast, with no delay.
But as dawn breaks, reality's thread,
I'm left with pieces, tears unshed.
The plushie falls, a silent plea,
A mirror to the darkness in me.
...
now tell me WHICH has a soul. the rhyming in the second one is so _forced,_ it's.....
in mine, you can tell the poetic voice is LOSING IT. _LOSING IT._ and then regrets it. In the second one, it tries to _tell_ you they're losing it, but it falls completely flat. like. bro. WHY A POEM ABOUT LOSING ALL COMPOSURE... _WITH A RHYME AND STRUCTURE._ if it were done by a human, i'd clutch my head SO hard like HOW could they have missed the point this badly.
AI is a parrot, a monkey with a typewriter, a broken clock - it can produce some good stuff, and the randomness of it does have some type of appeal, but ultimately there is nothing a language model can say that has any importance. Kind of sad that we are looking for humanity anywhere but other humans
I dunno. All text has two sides. The writer can feel the most important about what he writes and the reader can not care. Or the writer might not care and to the reader it hits hard
'The singularity is coming and it has a grill' reminded me a bit of Wendy Cope's 'The Orange' at the end there
You are much kinder than I would be about AI and I thank you for that. This is a nice analysis.
I think the phrase "separate the art from the artist" only works when the "art" was created by a human, because when you separate it, something intrinsically human remains, recognizable by anyone. Whereas AI "art" when separated from the "artist" remains nothing more than vague human reminiscences without a clear message, without a soul, like a puzzle whose pieces fit together but its image makes no sense.
"The singularity is coming and it has a grill" achieved what other ai poems couldn't - made me feel a bit sad.
Now I know that AI has no feelings, it didn't put any thought into it
But, the fact that "The singularity" got "forgotten" at the end made me feel a twinge of sadness.
Look, usually, when someone presents me with generic poems about love and heartbreak and all that sappy stuff, I roll my eyes. When I just discovered poetry, even a simple line like "And the vase was broken on the floor, just like my heart" made me feel all edgy and sad LOL, but I've long grown out of that.
I can see in poems when someone is TRYING to make me feel sad, when they bring shock value into it or talk about puppies dying alone etc etc, it feels manipulative to me, and I roll my eyes. Sometimes authors do it to sell their poem as a deep and nuanced poem (When it's usually not) or to make the reader feel the same misery they do, using the sad imagery in their poems almost like a weapon, trying to poke you to make you cry and convince you THEY the MIGHTY AUTHOR made you FEEL.(again not always, but I've seen a few), which, to that I say Boo-Hoo, I still roll my eyes and sigh in dissapointment
But, I think exactly because the AI didn't TRY to make me sad, (because it can't think or intend anything) Is why it caused a stir in me.
I think, the AI didn't intend for "The singularity" to resemble a person/character, I know it didn't because that wasn't in the prompt. And yet accidentally, it made symbolism for different kinds of people in the poem, the artist, the nihilist, the critic, the guest, and - the singularity. Everyone forgot about that "person", there's no grill needed for their party but if they remembered that The singularity is coming there would've been a grill, there would've been another "person" at the party. The image of a lone person shaped jumble of code is very clear in my mind, and it makes me feel something.
I will remind you I still agree with everything the author said, I'm not disagreeing or trying to raise a different point, it's just interesting how my silly meat brain interpreted the characters and symbols in this poem, i think i just get sad at people being left out of parties LMAO
Great video :P
If it's worth anything to your interpretation, the AI refers to (presumably) itself as a/the singularity throughout different poems in the book
This guy sounds like hes about to cry the entire video
I personally think if AI will become good enough, art will end up like clothing or furniture or candles - things that can be made by a human, but automation makes creating them way quicker.
Even if there are factories that produce socks en masse, cheaply and very quickly, are there still hand-knitten socks? Yes. Do people still buy them? Yes.
It's not just poetry, the internet is going to be full of this. Someone wrote a comment on a video that was really clever and well done. Then they revealed that they just had AI do it for them. And suddenly, I don't care at all, and I'm upset that they wasted my time. Stuff like this is going to happen more and more, and people will not be forthcoming about it being AI. The internet isn't going to matter in the near future
16:16 as soon as you remember it's just repeating writing from the internet, it falls apart. it's like when people think parrots are really talking but they're really just repeating words that they hear, but AI doesn't even have a soul like parrots do
When you read the three themes of Aum 2 I rolled my eyes so hard I’m surprised they didn’t fall out my face.
Like, I’m an artist and I roll my eyes when humans say their art is about ‘the human experience’. Usually means they have very little to say and they’re not quite sure how to express what they do have to say
"a short, poignant poem about happiness in the 21st century" (26:47) is genuinely a good poem!
something in common with all forms of ai-generated art, poetry, music, visual art, etc, is that the people who champion it only see art as the aesthetics that they present. they *know* people *like* art, but they don't know *why* people like art, and what they appreciate about art is only the most superficial aspects of it. that's why they're alright with immitation. they want their art to have the aesthetics, to look like, sound like, read like something they already know and look up to as "art".
ironically i think one of the most important aspects of art is mistakes, imperfections, and limitations. but when a human makes a mistake or runs into their limits, it tells you more about *them* as a person. when it happens to an ai, it's a sign of a bug, or a lapse in a data set. something to be patched out or painted over.
"Not capable of causing emotions in people" bullshiiiiit
15:42 I like that the rhyming starts after the 'I make some poetry' line- it frames the back half as a little poem within the poem. It's cute.
I always wanted an AI to write my poetry so I can spend more time cleaning and mowing the lawn.
"Aum" is not gibberish. It is the more-accurate transliteration of the Sanskrit word which is often transliterated as "Om", the pranava. The pranava is described in the upanishads as having four syllables: Ahhhh, Ohhhh, Mmmmm, and [silence]. Therefore it is often transliterated as Aum instead of the "purely onomatopoeia" "Om".
This is such common knowledge in so much of the world that I would bet everything I have that the author was conscious of it, and the title is itself an intentional humorous play on themes of absurd juxtaposition of machinery wtih the realm of the sublime, the soul.
I thought "Avant guarde" was sarcasm as in how free poetry writers would sound if they were honesy
the poem about the AI being an absence in a sea of water made me think of a bubble.
It's not that people hate AI, people hate soulless works pretending to be art, with no passion behind them. Works that are not made to be cool or enjoyable, but purely made for some kind of profit or benefit. This is a product not art, and whether a human hand touched it is irrelevant. Art is not a product manufactured on assembly line.
The "My creator is dead" poem was so cute cause imagine ai being sad at creator leaving to go to the grocery store. 😂😭
“Unfortunately AI is probably only going to get better” resentment mode to a 100
15:12 the actual _meat_ of the work
excuse me
I just asked chatgpt to rewrite one of my poems. I felt a lot more confident about my version after that 😂
Atleast they are honest about it being ai generated
As an artist who makes inspirational quote art I’m very cautious about ppl who engage in Ai art specifically because they steal art and have been horrible to actual artists. I also make poetry and wish to make songs. I hate that Art the expression of the soul itself is being taken over. It makes me sad that their using text from dead artists. It feels like desecrating a corpse and glamorizing it.
The "I am so unloved" one would have so much potential with an addendum "And they are right, I do not feel anything". Besides, I would love to work with AI, I admire our progress from afar quite passionately, so it seems like a skill issue on the programmers side.
It would be nice to get an "answer" from a human in this poem, about how this is not true: all the human civilization loves our accomplishments.
I do not believe in separating art from the artist. I think it's a blind, selfish and cowardly way to experience art. Firstly, because art cannot, in any way imaginable, happen without an artist. Therefore, separating the two completely negates the existence of the former, while insulting the creative necessity of the latter. Secondly, because in the many, many cases where the artist is on the spectrum of horrible person all the way to monster, separating their art from their monstrosity is doing a disservice to whoever is experiencing this art that the artist would have gladly seen dead.
There is no world where it is okay to open a gallery full of Hitler's painting, hide who the artist is and invite a room full of Jewish conservators and art enthusiasts. There is no world where it is okay to show Picasso to young girls without telling them he would have gladly slept with them, to show Lovecraft's novels to black and POC readers without letting them know he thought they were no better than animals, to show Rowling's work to LGBTQIA+ people and trans people in particular without showing them how much she wishes they were all dead.
Separating the art from the artist is the coward's way out, it's the easy way of experiencing art without having to think about what the artist meant, who the artist was, why the artist made the art in the first place. On the opposite side of the spectrum from the previously listed monsters, how insulting to show Van Gogh's most poignant paintings without talking about his mental illness, his medication, his therapist, his brother's love. How bland to go through art's most interesting movements without explaining the historical context that birthed them. How sad to let someone listen to traditional folk music without them knowing about the folks who made it and enjoyed it throughout the ages. How completely detached from reality to give an AI's poetry collection to a class full of student for them to analyse and never once mention it was written by AI.
I will forever be against the Death of the Artist, or separating the art from the artist, whatever people want to call it. It is a revolting notion that takes the human element out of the most human form of expression to ever exist. It baffles me that this is even a discussion in the first place and I can't help but be a little put off by people who swear by that notion. How completely misanthrope of them. How sad.
There is definitely value in trying to understand a piece of art on its own merits, free from the context it was made in.
It's a foul thing if the *only* way someone is willing to engage with art is when it's rid of its context, and worse if this hollow way of understanding art is forced upon others by not presenting art with its context.
But it would be no less cowardly to act as if the author's intent and understanding of the work and the world is the only perspective that matters when you're engaging with a piece of art. I don't think that's what you actually mean, but when you say art cannot be separated from the artist, that seems to imply it cannot be understood or enjoyed properly without knowing about the artist, and the culture and the time period and so on, that it was produced in.
And it definitely can.
Knowing all those things can deepen or completely reframe your understanding of a piece, but your own interpretation matters too. It matters a lot.
...i feel like "seperating the art from the artist" is being misunderstood a lot. the point isnt to fully seperate the art and artist, its that the artists intent doesnt override the viewers expirience, the viewers expirience matters. like Zdzisław Beksiński denies that his art is at all about ww2, but you look at it and its like. come on man lmao.
@@3012mathiasThanks for the thoughtful reply. So as you say, indeed I don't mean there is no place for understanding art outside of its context. My response was firstly about what was said in the video but more broadly about the defenders of a complete Death of the Artist, people who maintain that an author's intent has no value, no place, and art should only be experienced on its own merit.
I think the reason why I've taken such a strong stance over the years against this concept is because I don't believe it to be the solution to this philosophical question. Just as it would be too extreme to tell someone they're unable to understand a piece of art without knowing the author's life/context, it is extreme and, in my opinion, very small minded, to believe you can completely amputate a piece of art from its artist.
Case in point, the oldest art forms in the world. Hand outlines spray-painted onto the walls of French caves, sculptures of voluptuous women-goddesses, engravings in lost pictorial languages, all these are bits and pieces of art we've lost the context for. And how sad it is, to have lost that context. It's not a coincidence that archaeologists and other professionals of art history spend decades trying to tie these to different cultures, practices, etc.
There is so much to be found in the knowledge of who made art. And again, to me it is such an antithesis to believe in Death of the Artist, for the very simple fact that no art would ever exist without an artist. It is of course very possible (and normal) to enjoy these hand-paintings and old sculptures, but how much enriching, curious and fun would it be to know who made them, why, when? For what purpose, with what intentions?
I also think it's a bit pretentious to believe your own interpretation has more value than the artist's explicit intention (emphasis on explicit). Disrespectful as well. And when these intentions were rotten to the core, ignoring them in favour of your own, basically to protect your enjoyment of the art, is something I can't find any respect for. Like, there is a world of difference between a dream-catcher made by a Native artist, with all its cultural importance as well as the artist's choices of colour and materials and weaving, and a dream-catcher made by a white mom following a DIY tutorial from troom-troom. Side-by-side, they might look identical. But they do not have the same value, do not represent the same thing, don't take up the same space in the world of art.
I think it boils down to this: too many times I have seen people continuously supporting financially and socially absolute monsters because they really enjoyed a piece of art that person made, or because it holds a place in their childhood or helped them through a tough time. When armed with the knowledge of the artist's intent, these people use Death of the Artist as a shield to ignore the harm they can do in their continued support.
Far from having stayed a philosophical debate in art history or in papers, this has become a tool to wield in this ridiculous culture war we can't seem to be able to escape and to that effect, very rarely do you find thoughtful, measured discussion that holds any interest at all. Instead, you get posturing, moral superiority and the selfish impulse to defend your favourite thing at all cost against any criticism.
@@BlisaBLisa I kinda disagree with you on that, in particular the last part. I'm a published author and one of the works I have out there was written with a very specific message and intent. I've talked to people who read something completely different from my story, with the same reaction as you like "how did you NOT mean this? this is so clearly about x" and it was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've had as an artist. This sort of flippant, "I know better than you" and even worse, being told I'm lying about what my intent and the meaning behind my work was. I don't think a viewer's experience overrides the artist's intent. I think the artist's intent is the primary thing that matters in a work of art, and then the viewer builds on top of that with what it makes them feel.
@@TheGallicWitch i can see why thats frustrating (and its wrong of people to accuse the artist/author of lying about their intent like that, which to be clear im not accusing Zdzisław Beksiński of I think he really didnt intend to make art about ww2 but thats what he ended up doing, his life expiriences came through in what was meant to be horror art with not much depth) for me art is a way of communicating things about myself that i cant otherwise, so ofc i want my art to be read how i intended it to, but i also have to accept i dont really have full ownership of my art once i put it out there.
communication is 2 sided, its not just about whats in my head its about what other people hear me say. if most people read my art differently than how i intended that usually means I didnt communicate it well enough, and if I did and most people read it how I intended but a few people read it differently they aren't necessarily wrong for how they interpreted it. art isnt objective, thought some interpretations have more "evidence" for them than others, like there is this (metaphorical but fairly easy to understand) political comic i made that the vast majority of people read how i intended but a few read it as supporting their racist ideas. they are "wrong" in that they have shitty beliefs and that there is not a lot of support for them you can pull from that comic.
but like jk rowling for example, even before all the terf stuff shes been critisized for elements of her writing such as the goblins really coming across as antisemitic caricatures. im inclined to believe her that she didnt intend to do that, i think she just mindlessly regurgitated antisemitic tropes without realizing it, but the outcome is the same so its incredibly frustrating how dismissive shes been of those criticisms and how she continues to double down on how she did nothing wrong. because she thinks of herself as a progressive person, so when she’s accused of conveying ideas that go against that she dismisses it and never self-reflects.
you can see this a lot in her terf ideology esp lately where she’s escalated it to outright holocaust denial, she keeps saying insane deranged shit with seemingly no self awareness bc her ideas about herself are all that matter to her, so anyone reading what she says as holocaust denial must be wrong because it goes against her idea of herself. its an extreme example but my point is that its not just about what’s inside your head
You know the sad thing about the boomerang song? Set it to music, and you've got a #1 hit. And people all over the country will be singing along.
Did you say that poem about eating a book gave you something to chew on?
I guessed that the sequel to "Aum Golly" was going to be called "Aum Gollier".
one thing people don't understand
about poetry
is that if you write a piece of
prose
entirely
in lowercase
and rando
mly
inser
t
line
breaks
it does not magically become a poem. And it makes me angry that people do that and call it poetry.
They also don't understand that just because a piece is short doesn't mean it's a poem.
It also bothers me when they hide behind the words "challenges conventional notions", as in "My poetry challenges conventional notions of what poetry can be." I presume these notions include that poetry should be something different, something more beautiful, more interesting, or otherwise more pleasing, than regular prose; that poetry should be something special. It challenges conventional notions of what poetry can be in the same way that a coprophagia film challenges conventional notions of what food can be.
You keep calling AALho ALAho.
Right? The 'insert random line breaks and call it poetry in the name of challenging conventional notions' people are the same brand of people as:
1. Artists who refuse to learn how to draw (or paint or whatever) properly because 'art has no rules'.
2. Writers who refuse to read or to implement the 'rules' about writing in their works because 'you can write whatever you want'.
Like, yes, it's important to challenge conventional notions about what X or Y form of art can be; yes, it's true that art has no rules and that you can write whatever you want _but_ to challenge conventional notions, you should first understand what the conventional notions are and why. 'Short poetry with random line breaks' can be done well but for that, you have to know about poetry and what makes poetry meaningful and beautiful (and at that point, I don't think the random line breaks will remain random; I think they would be intentional). Art has been made with uncanny proportions and unusual colors/color combinations or black shadows and what not but the thing is, when it's done well, it's done by people who know how to draw with correct proportions and how colors work with each other. Not people who are just starting to learn art. And similarly, you can write whatever you want and you don't _have_ to follow the writing guidelines (because that's what they are) and you don't _have_ to read but if you do that, you will end up with writing that says too much or not enough or goes on too long or not enough. You will end up repeating cliches (goes for poetry too). You will end up with sentences that doesn't accurately capture the story. Or you won't be able to show the imagery or emotions well. Or you'll end up showing everything or telling everything. And again, people who understand these guidelines well can decide not to follow them and they will still end up with beautiful work. But as with every other example here, when people who know and understand the 'rules' don't follow them, it's intentional.
I guess the TL;DR is that you can't challenge the conventional notions if you don't know what the conventional notions are. I believe challenging conventional notions require intentionality, which just isn't something people who have no prior knowledge of the art form possess IMO. And I believe the prior knowledge should include both: knowledge about the artistic as well as technical aspects of the art form.
@@Saphia_ the thing I do as a writer to 'challenge' norms is to normally have ;
1. morally gray characters leading the story / every character is morally gray
2.open ended endings
3.bad endings
and it's not like I am saying literally no one else has done these, or that these are inherently breaking the fabric of writing because ((they don't)) I just like to write them more often because often stories have ideas pitted against each other, and the hero that is labeled, wins. definitely wins no error in that ideal. happy ever after, and it is fun to read and write something different, it's more of personal preference to sight that no one is morally above another, even in fiction.
@@ihavenoclueidk I love your view on this.
Remember when google actually searched the web? I never thought I would long for 50 pages of results but here I am
I toil with the white fluid secreting out of me.
Black is the thick old glue that becomes it was.
The vessel cracks, leaks and almost is none.
No longer in capacity for the foul stench of its master.
It must be let go.
There is a bias that humans think when there is communication there is meaning. Because that is our experience. ChatGPT does not respect that. It has no inherent sense of meaning and its goal is not to be meaningful in its communication but to seem meaningful enough.
HG Moeller describes AI as a "jargon machine".
I think AI Art is like loading a truck with art, driving it to a landfill, dumping that art in a random way and then we look at it and we can see some meaning in it, but the longer you look the more you realize that nobody created an installation here, this is just a garbage dump of things that once meant something.
I really don't want to dismiss any effort of trying to find out about the relationship between AI and human intelligence. After all, AI is here to stay. But there are a lot of myths around it, the biggest one being that it is artificial. And the second biggest one that it is an intelligence in any other way than being an algorithm obsessed with statistics and nothing else.
I do not think AI will ever be any good at anything apart from being a tool of statistics. It will never be sentient, it will never want to communicate their world to you because it has no world. I know there are a lot of hopes for it, but it's not a child. AI is not a human child that can grow up to understand more complex systems. It is a calculator with 07734 turned upside down.
Please, somebody make a movie titled Aum Golly: The Next Evolution. I don't care what it's about, I just want to see it on a poster somewhere.
I find that the biggest feature of ai is that when looking at it, reading it, or listening to it, i immediately zone out due to boredom
The boomerang song sounds like the opening to a call and response camp song
7 billion made me feel something only cause of the fact chat gpt was spewing self hatred while he tried moving it towards what he wanted
Great video! Stuff like this is what I hoped to find for image generators. People analyzing it, maybe pointing out how they would've done it better.
Instead a lot I find was just laughing about bad hand generations and long rants about how it's bad cause it's stealing.
I do think its funny, you do adress the irony of the emptiness behind the words of the poems, yet the empty supremacy the Ai writes effects you in a real way.
9:48 this sounds like a lemon demon song title 😭😭😭
When it comes to the question of whether AI language models actually "understand" what they're saying or why they're saying it, the answer isn't as simple as "no", despite what the Snapchat AI told you.
While it's true that LLMs are trained only to determine the most natural way to complete phrases, in many cases the only way to reliably do that is to have a very basic model of reality to work with, especially when the phrase it needs to complete isn't directly related to anything in it's training set. As an example, the only way to convincingly complete the phrase "What is the cube root of 123?" is by actually learning to solve cube roots. If you ask ChatGPT that question, it will give you an inaccurate but close answer, which would be impossible without some learned internal computation. The same goes for writing code, and could conceivably be applied to the more abstract concepts referenced in the poetry here.
ChatGPT has ingested a very large number of archived math exams which contain sentences formatted similarly to "What is the cube root of 123?" followed by some answer of a length and content which has some statistical relationships to the digits in the previous sentence, which the model can do its best to tease out. Asking any logical or computational questions of a kind not represented in the training material very quickly goes from moderately impressive to a total crapshoot.
@@Tuxfanturnip "Some statistical relationship to the digits in the previous sentence" yeah, that statistical relationship is the cube root, and if the model can "tease out" that relationship, it's learned the cube root. What am I missing?
@@74oshua the cube root is not a statistical relationship. the model does not learn to do the cube root, it learns to regurgitate some digits that happen to look vaguely like a cube root, and not remotely reliably.
@@Tuxfanturnip It... literally is a statistical relationship. It's a function.
@@74oshua If a number is 3 digits long, and its first digit is 1, its cube root is going to be 4.something or 5.something. By analyzing enough texts with consecutive sentences describing a number and its cube root, this will be a very obvious pattern to pick up and reproduce without ever "knowing" how to actually calculate a cube root or developing the ability to generalize to, say, 4-digit numbers that start with 5. Sure, if you put those problems in the training data, back-propagation will eventually start giving you answers that look vaguely right to more and more different questions, but that's about it. You're turning math textbooks into a lookup table that doesn't even work right.
I liked the poem about the potato. It seemed like something I would have found in a Shel Silverstein book