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

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Readers prefer ChatGPT poems over Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath 

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

JORDI PÉREZ COLOMÉ

NOV 14, 2024 - 12:24 COT

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what would the experts do?

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

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

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

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

It's an aesthetic issue

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

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

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

EL PAÍS 

 

Poem of the week: The Kurdish Musician by Mimi Khalvati

An émigré player’s artistry sings through a London street, rising over many barriers

Carol Rumens

Mon 11 Nov 2024 11.00 GMT

The Kurdish Musician

She is swaddled in pink, sky-blue and veiled
in a gold hejab that with every chime
of her santoor dangles its fringe where trailed

on her cheeks hang coins that bob in time
to her nods, throb in a pause, sway to tremor
and echo. Poised on thumbs, twin hammers mime

a flurry of wings, two thin furred tongues that stammer
at strings, streaming a swarm of rising notes
not through field and hedgerow, blossom and clover,

but through space and stars to the huge black throats
of gully and scarp where all music is stilled,
hived in a dome, as she is, rapt, remote,

impervious to the here and now, hands filled
with flightpaths winging home. Through her who knows
what trails might meet or where pollen has spilled

strange hybrids take, scrub thrive or desert rose;
groundcover prove alive, on five dark grounds
now train its greening shoots? Or who’d suppose

in a London sky, pink, sky-blue, that has wound
itself in the sun’s hejab, in fold on fold
veiled its own dark grounds, she too could be found,
head in the clouds, while ours are fringed with gold?

***

From a fine Collected Poems representing all Mimi Khalvati’s major publications from 1991 to 2019, The Kurdish Musician represents that mysteriously timeless realm of all the best “Collecteds”, the selection of undated poems never previously included in a book.

Khalvati’s poetic achievement, recently recognised by the award of the King’s gold medal, has been shaped by her profound imaginative relationship with her home country of Iran. The musician in the poem is a kindred spirit; exiled from the neighbouring regions of western Asia that comprise Kurdistan, she transfigures her own loss into re-possession, and makes a gift of her presence to those under the “London sky” who witness her artistry.

The instrument the woman is playing is a hammered dulcimer, its tonal complexity suggested by the terza rima weave of the verse-form the poet has chosen. The woman’s relationship to her instrument is evoked by the keenly observed rhythmical movements of her body, while the soft organic colours of her clothes, “gold”, “pink” and “sky-blue”, harmonise her with the sunset. The hammers she wields both “mime / a flurry of wings” and are “two thin furred tongues”. The tongues “stammer at strings” in a flickering movement which is nevertheless productive, “streaming a swarm of rising notes” – finally bringing wings and tongues together, and suggesting birdsong. This is birdsong with resonance beyond English pastoral, however; the music bypasses “field and hedgerow” with their seasonal markers of spring blossom and summer clover. It ascends “through space and stars” and its reach seems both topological and cosmic. The “huge black throats / of gully and scarp where all music is stilled” seem to indicate a partly metaphysical space which is not only the musician’s mountainous homeland but an ideal realm above the earth. The interplay of images comes briefly to rest in the idea of absolute mental concentration (another way of being “hived in a dome”) and the still-active culmination of the “flight” metaphor in the beautifully imagined “hands filled / with flightpaths winging home”. The musician is “remote” from her surroundings, but fully present to the music and the double sense of location it sets free.

Now the focus is literally brought down to earth to be re-grounded in its subsoil. The vitality of multidirectional movement expresses itself through the pollination and proliferation of plants, perhaps to produce “strange hybrids” or basic but essential “scrub” and “groundcover”. The metaphorical landscape is tightened by questions, the first concerning what “trails” may have accrued from the musician’s trials of emigration. Perhaps the “five dark grounds” represent areas geologically inhospitable to life, and there may be implications of the politically “dark grounds” which the welcoming sky veils in “the sun’s hejab”. The final question affirms the arrival of the musician as enrichment and challenges negatives of exile and emigration: “… who’d suppose… she too could be found, / head in the clouds while ours are fringed in gold?” The delicacy and versatility of words such as “fringe”, “trail” and “veil” heighten an impression of what we might call, narrow-mindedly, other-worldliness, but the poem knows that the musician’s seemingly transcendental power is earthed. Like the sun she touches the heads of the gathered crowd with gold.

THE GUARDIAN

Haïm Nahman Bialik / In the City of Slaughter

 

Joseph Budko (Plonsk, 1888 – Jérusalem, 1940), Dans la ville du massacre, Berlin, 1923. Illustration pour le poème éponyme de Haïm Nahman Bialik (c) mahJ

 

In the City of Slaughter

• 
  
• Haïm Nahman Bialik 
• 16 October 2023

In 1903, in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, Haïm Nahman Bialik left Odessa and went to the scene of the massacre to gather evidence from the survivors. He wrote a poem which, powerfully expressing his horror and anguish at the situation of the Jews of Eastern Europe at that moment in European history, immediately found a considerable echo in the Jewish world.

Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls reach,
Where wider grows the hollow, and greater grows the breach;
Pass over the shattered hearth, attain the broken wall
Those burnt and barren brick, whose charred stones reveal
The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending
Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal.
There will thy feet in feathers sink, and stumble
On wreckage doubly wrecked, scroll heaped on manuscript.
Fragments again fragmented

Pause not upon this havoc; go thy way
Unto the attic mount, upon thy feet and hands;
Behold the shadow of death among the shadows stands.
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all;
They did not pluck their eyes out; they
Beat not their brains against the wall!
Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher bad it in his heart to pray:
A miracle, O Lord, and spare my skin this day!

Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs
The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs
Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,
Concealed and cowering -the sons of the Maccabees!
The seed of saints, the scions of the lions!
Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame
So sanctified My name!
It was the flight of mice they fled,
The scurrying of roaches was their flight;
They died like dogs, and they were dead!
And on the next morn, after the terrible night
The son who was not murdered found
The spurned cadaver of his father on the ground.
Now wherefore dost thou weep, O son of Man?

Brief-weary and forespent, a dark Shekinah
Runs to each nook and cannot find its rest;
Wishes to weep, but weeping does not come;
Would roar; is dumb.
Its head beneath its wing, its wing outspread
Over the shadows of the martyr’d dead,
Its tears in dimness and in silence shed.

And thou, too, son of man, close now the gate behind thee;
Be closed in darkness now, now thine that charnel space;
So tarrying there thou wilt be one with pain and anguish
And wilt fill up with sorrow thine heart for all its days.
Then on the day of thine own desolation
A refuge will it seem,
Lying in thee like a curse, a demon’s ambush,
The haunting of an evil dream,
O, carrying it in thy heart, across the world’s expanse
Thou wouldst proclaim it, speak it out,
But thy lips shall not find its utterance.

Beyond the suburbs go, and reach the burial ground.
Let no man see thy going; attain that place alone,
A place of sainted graves and martyr-stone.
Stand on the fresh-turned soil.
There in the dismal corner, there in the shadowy nook,
Multitudinous eyes will look
Upon thee from the sombre silence
The spirits of the martyrs are these souls,
Gathered together, at long last,
Beneath these rafters and in these ignoble holes.
The hatchet found them here, and hither do they come
To seal with a last look, as with their final breath,
The agony of their lives, the terror of their death.
Question the spider in his lair!
His eyes beheld these things; and with his web he can
A tale unfold horrific to the ear of man:
A tale of cloven belly, feather-filled;
Of nostrils nailed, of skull-bones bashed and spilled;
Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother’s cold and milkless breast;
Of how a dagger halved an infant’s word,
Its ma was heard, its mama never heard.

Then wilt thou bid thy spirit – Hold, enough!
Stifle the wrath that mounts within thy throat,
Bury these things accursed,
Within the depth of thy heart, before thy heart will burst!
Then wilt thou leave that place, and go thy way
And lo-
The earth is as it was, the sun still shines:
It is a day like any other day.

Descend then, to the cellars of the town,
There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled,
Where seven heathen flung a woman down,
The daughter in the presence of her mother,
The mother in the presence of her daughter,
Before slaughter, during slaughter and after slaughter!

Note also, do not fail to note,
In that dark corner, and behind that cask
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath
The bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!
Such silence will take hold of thee, thy heart will fail
With pain and shame, yet I
Will let no tear fall from thine eye.
Though thou wilt long to bellow like the driven ox
That bellows, and before the Altar balks,
I will make hard thy heart, yea, I
Will not permit a sigh.

Joseph Budko (Plonsk, 1888 – Jerusalem, 1940), In the City of Slaughter, Berlin, 1923. Illustration for the poem of the same name by Haïm Nahman Bialik (c) mahJ

 

See, see, the slaughtered calves, so smitten and so laid;
Is there a price for their death? How shall that price be paid?
Forgive, ye shamed of the earth, yours is a pauper-Lord!
Poor was He during your life, and poorer still of late.
When to my door you come to ask for your reward,
I’ll open wide: See, I am fallen from My high estate.
I grieve for you, my children. My heart is sad for you.
Your dead were vainly dead; and neither I nor you
Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws;
Your deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause.

Turn, then, thy gaze from the dead, and I will lead
Thee from the graveyard to thy living brothers,
And thou wilt come, with those of thine own breed,
Into the synagogue, and on a day of fasting,
To hear the cry of their agony,
Their weeping everlasting.
Thy skin will grow cold, the hair on thy skin stand up,
And thou wilt be by fear and trembling tossed;
Thus groans a people which is lost.
Look in their hearts – behold a dreary waste,
Where even vengeance can revive no growth,
And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction
Rises, no blasphemous oath.
Speak to them, bid them rage!
Let them against me raise the outraged hand,
Let them demand!
Demand the retribution for the shamed
Of all the centuries and every age!
Let fists be flung like stone
Against the heavens and the heavenly Throne!

And thou, too, pity them not, nor touch their wound;
Within their cup no further measure pour.
Wherever thou wilt touch, a bruise is found,
Their flesh is wholly sore.
For since they have met pain with resignation
And have made peace with shame,
What shall avail thy consolation?
They are too wretched to evoke thy scorn.
They are too lost thy pity to evoke.
So let them go, then, men to sorrow born,
Mournful and slinking, crushed beneath their yoke.
So to their homes, and to their hearth depart
Rot in the bones, corruption in the heart.
And go upon the highway,
Thou shalt then meet these men destroyed by sorrow,
Sighing and groaning, at the doors of the wealthy
Proclaiming their sores, like so much peddler’s wares,
The one his battered head, t’other limbs unhealthy,
One shows a wounded arm, and one a fracture bares.
And all have eyes that are the eyes of slaves,
Slaves flogged before their masters;
And each one begs, and each one craves:
Reward me, Master, for that my skull is broken.
Reward me for my father who was martyred!

And so their sympathy implore.
For you are now as you have been of yore
As you stretched your hand
So will you stretch it,
And as you have been wretched

So are you wretched!
What is thy business here, o son of man?
Rise, to the desert flee!
The cup of affliction thither bear with thee!
Take thou they soul, rend it in many a shred!
With impotent rage, thy heart deform!
Thy tear upon the barren boulders shed
And send they bitter cry into the storm.

K.

Delmore Schwartz

 

Holy Delmore

The originary 20th-century American Jewish writer and poet is famous for his descent into drug-addled madness. A new collection shows quantities of self-obsessed dreck shot through with redeeming literary and critical genius.

BY

DAVID MIKICS

JULY 11, 2024

The New York intellectuals, Irving Howe once said, were obsessed “by the idea of the Jew (not always distinguished from the idea of Delmore Schwartz).” Delmore, as everyone called him, was a boy wonder, opening the revamped Partisan Review’s first issue in 1937 at the age of 23, with his perfect short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” (The issue included work by Picasso, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Wallace Stevens, and James Agee, but Delmore’s story headed the table of contents.) Then his first book of poetry arrived, hailed by Allen Tate as “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot.” But he came to a dismal end, an alcoholic and pill addict burdened by paranoid fantasies. Since Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and James Atlas’ classic biography, Delmore has been more celebrated for the legend of his wasted talent than for his actual literary production. Schwartz the writer has gotten short shrift.

Pablo Neruda / Being born in the woods

Being born in the woods

by Pablo Neruda

Translated by W.S.Merwin

Pablo Neruda / Naciendo en los bosques

When the rice withdraws from the earth

the grains of its flour,
when the wheat hardens its little hip-joints
and lifts its face of a thousand hands,
I make my way to the grove where the woman and the man embrace,
to touch the innumerable sea
of what continues.

I am not a brother of the implement carried on the tide
as in a cradle of embattled mother-of-pearl:
I do not tremble in the territory of the dying garbage,
I do not wake at the shock of the dark
that is frightened by the hoarse leaf-stalks of the sudden bell,
I cannot be, I am not the traveller
under whose shoes the last remnants of the wind throb
and the waves come back rigid out of time to die.

I carry in my hand the dove that sleeps recumbent in the seed
and in its dense ferment of lime and blood
August lives,
raised out of its deep goblet the month lives:
with my hand I encircle the new shadow of the wing that is growing:
the root and the feather that will form the thicket of tomorrow.

The immense growth of the drop, and the eyelid yearning to be open
never diminish, neither beside the balcony of iron hands

nor in the maritime winter of the abandoned, nor in my late footstep:
for I was born in order to be born, to contain the steps
of all that approaches, of all that beats on my breast like a new trembling heart.

Lives resting beside my clothes like parallel doves
or contained in my own existence and in my lawless sound
in order to return to being, to lay hold on the air denuded of its leaf
and on the moist birth of the soil in the wreath: how long
can I return and be, how long can the odour
of the most deeply buried flowers, of the waves most finely
pulverized on the high rocks, preserve in me their homeland
where they can return to be fury and perfume?

 

Mona Aicha Masri: I Want to Pray

For our first excerpt from A Bay of Megaphones, the new anthology of young Hungarian poets, we offer a poem by Mona Aicha Masri, whose "fearless love poetry writes itself into the rich Western and Eastern tradition of amor sanctus," writes András Visky. I Want to Pray is translated by Anna Bentley

 17th March, 2023

Mona Aicha Masri’s fearless love poetry writes itself into the rich Western and Eastern tradition of amor sanctus. It does this, however, not as religious ecstasy, but instead as the burning loneliness of unconsummated love, in which the solitariness of the body is heightened and its lonely opening-up becomes an occasion for welcoming the world in. In Masri’s poems, erotica is the way to “emptying inwards,” and the setting free of the tongue a practice which, in this dynamic, “elevates” colloquial language and even slang as well, and makes these the chief material with which we can sense both ourselves and the world.

Physical sensations turn into linguistic surprises and vice versa: the multilingual texts that are born in this stream of consciousness (at this time mainly characteristic of her prose) lay bare deep levels of identity. Slang and hidden Biblical references, textual fragments of Ancient Hebrew and Greek koine: all of these make tangible to the reader a sort of permanent transience, the cracks and fissures that come about on the surface of time. Mona Aicha Masri’s textual inundations are sudden, beautiful, cataclysmic bursts of meaning; they sweep us along relentlessly but gently.

András Visky

 

 

I Want to Pray

 

If you were here, I’d say lie down beside me on the green blanket, the winking of the fairy lights wouldn’t bother us, the scent of cinnamon, we’d look good in the cold glow. You’d ask what’s new, and I’d say this year I learned

 

to be empathetic, forehead-wrinkling, eyebrow-raising, just the inner part of it near the nose, we mustn’t tip over into astonishment.

 

Give it a try, no not like that, look at me. Imagine you want to press your eyeballs
into an oval, two eggs. Relax your lips, no not that much, don’t laugh

 

The Christmas sweets are kitschy, you say. The blue ones are always coconut? Or the coconut ones always blue? The wrapper rustles on my thighs, the jelly melts onto my clit.

 

This year I didn’t fall in love, that’s your fault too. In my twenties I can’t write
about death, it won’t do. I’m tired of BKV poetry, IKEA prose and. I always forget the third one,

 

the opposing principles, that not every black is white, not every white is black. That in the new creation there’ll be no time, the tree of life will fruit
twelve times a year.

 

Love should be what I, guys are so boring, in my desperation of women’s bums, who cares what. I think of. I think of death. While I’m carting a cabbage in my rucksack, picking up dog shit, or now, here. I worry,

 

when we talk, lord, I get this far in the prayer. I told Kata, you know,
the psychologist. She asked me to try. If you’re here,

 

lie down next to me. The fairy lights won’t bother us, the pine needles
stick to the soles of your feet, you ask, what’s new, and I say
nothing much, weekday-stuff, but you know that.

 

Translated by Anna Bentley

HLO HU