What bad AI poetry reveals about AI; and this is crucial

At the MIT Press Reader, psychologist Keith Holyoak pens a long piece, “Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?”

Far down in his piece, he states: “It’s easy to dismiss AI poetry on the grounds that it has so far failed to produce any good poems… But the fact that AI programs have yet to reach the level of human makars is not conclusive evidence that AI can never do so.”

He offers an example of a sort-of poem produced by an AI-human collaboration:

‘My marriage is an emotional prison / Barred visitors do marriages allow / The most unitary collective scarcely organizes so much / Intimidate me with the official regulation of your prison / Let your sexual degradation charm me…’

My review: bad. Really bad.

AI is certainly capable of writing poems “in the style of” any poet you choose. And those efforts are slightly better than absolutely horrendous. Maybe.

But AI will never be able to write good or great ORIGINAL poetry, because AI has no originality.

It can pick and choose from billions of words and associations. It can slam a few words together oddly. It can fake a poem.

But AI is a machine. It’s a collection of programs. Algorithms. Mathematical calculations.

It’s not creating.

Not in the ways a human artist does.

You can’t lay out, in a spread sheet, all the elements that go into the human creative act, and you can’t weigh their “comparative importance.”

Human promoters of AI won’t admit that. They can’t see it. They’re lost.

Asking AI to be truly creative is like asking a locomotive to move further on down the tracks from Beethoven. Not only doesn’t it work. The request makes no sense.