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AI Is Incapable of Poetry

It’s incapable of producing anything creative that isn’t dreck.

If Anthropic had offered me $15,000 to use five pieces of my published work to train its large language models, I would have said no way. Why should I help Dario Amodei, the company’s CEO, to debase language, imagination, individuality, art? Aren’t people stupid enough already? Perhaps anticipating this response from writers, a proud and prickly lot, Anthropic simply took some 500,000 books and articles and used them without the authors’ knowledge or permission. That’s plagiarism. Three authors filed a lawsuit, and a court ruling requires Anthropic to pay out $1.5 billion—lunch money for the company, which is valued at $380 billion. I filled out the online forms to collect my $15,000 share—well, actually my brilliant young assistant, who describes herself as a “digital native,” did that. The forms were pretty complicated, probably just to remind us old-fashioned scribblers who really holds the upper hand here. After all, the damage is done, and no amount of settlement money can undo it.

About a year ago, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem “in the style of Katha Pollitt.” The result was fairly ridiculous: more like a greeting-card jingle than a poem by anyone over the age of 10. Whew! I tested ChatGPT again just now. Apparently it has been taking poetry workshops. Singsong rhyme and meter are out; free verse and wistfulness are in. Here’s the beginning:

     The meeting runs long, as meetings do—     a table of voices, mostly baritone,     interrupted by a careful soprano     that learns to fold itself between commas.     Outside, the city conducts its own debate:     sirens insisting, buses sighing dissent,     a woman on the corner counting tips     like a rosary of small survivals.

This has all the tics of contemporary mediocre poetry: the knowing nudge (“as meetings do”), the look out the window (“Outside, the city”), the careless mixed metaphors. That........

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