On Robopoetics

“Frost’s diction hones our cognition, schooling us to see the world in a fresh way. None of that is possible with gpt-3. Short for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer,’ the model is unique not simply because of what it does, but also how it does it. It learns about language from watching grammar and syntax in action. The algorithms effectively train themselves. They pick up patterns in the data and, through a relentless process of trial and error, approximate them. That’s how, under the right conditions, gpt-3 can parrot impressively realistic paragraphs of text. Its credibility, however, drops to zero the longer you spend with it. Eventually you realize it is vacantly yoking bits of colloquialized detritus, bobs and tags of speech. Of course, the system makes a nice show of making sense, so we forgive its failures. But the failures are no less real: malfunctioning tones, misfires of inflection. gpt-3’s output is a shell of hyperactivity with nothing inside—a mesmerizing mix of materials without a center, language on autopilot. This is what led the MIT Technology Review to call gpt-3 ‘a fluent spouter of bullshit’ and the researcher Timnit Gebru to warn against giving too high a mark to the program, citing the human tendency to ‘impute meaning where there is none...’ For gpt-3 to pull off the real thing will require that algorithms not only move data, but are moved by it; that they not only consume our experiences but feel the fleetingness of our lives. How do you confer knowledge of mortality? There is no computational shortcut for that. Compressed into Frost’s choice of ‘appall’ was a lifetime’s insight on loss. This is why poetry, unlike so much else our species has mastered, cannot be copied. It’s an artifact of introspection that can only be mastered by our species. There is no superhuman way to write poems because we write them by virtue of being what a computer isn’t: human.”

Carmine Starnino, “Poetry and Digital Personhood,” newcriterion.com/issues/2022/4/poetry-digital-personhood. An interesting summary of recent natural language processing developments. While not cited, it echoes debates about the way poetry is endemic to human being after Martin Heidegger’s work. This was a point taken forward in Hubert Dreyfus’s What Computers Still Can’t Do. At issue is the degree to which human minds are, in essence, not reducible to computation. The point made in the essay above is similarly that the pursuit of robopoetics is a red herring. Nonetheless, the essay cites the more interesting question which is the degree to which AI can be applied to manipulate human behavior, nonetheless. While incapable of poetry, computational approaches to language are beginning to excel at exploiting natural human empathy and emotions. In another register, it is interesting how so many video games have trafficked on the human feeling of frailty or what Heidegger referred to as the poetics of being towards death. The anxiety built into the video game is often precarious lives lost. While incapable of replicating Frost’s poetry, they nonetheless excel at generating clickbait.