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Comment by kusokurae | Hacker News Reader

Maybe my logic is choppy but I'm unconvinced that it is useful to use (inexperienced) popular sentiment as a marker of some kind of reference for cultural quality here. The average person has read at most 100 poems; people who really like poetry will be reading quite a bit more, and that experience has relevance in a context such as this. I'm more curious what happens when we look at specifically those humans who engage in substantial, regular engagement with a given artform.

The study is interesting but that the general public enjoy the most statistically calculated, 50% grey inoffensive, unchallenging & formulaic poetry isn't too novel -- I don't much read poetry and I'm sure I'd be voting for the AI also.

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Just for fun, I had ChatGPT rewrite your comment as a poem. Here’s the result:

————

My logic may be choppy, but I’m not yet sold, That popular sentiment should be the gold, For judging culture's worth or depth or art, When most have seen so little, played no part.

The average person, read just a hundred lines, While those who love the craft cross many signs, With pages turned, they gain a richer view, That shapes what art they’ll seek, and how they choose.

The study’s neat, but here’s what I believe: The crowd enjoys the safe, the bland, the brief— The 50% grey, inoffensive way, The formulaic poems that softly sway.

I don't read much myself, I must admit, But even I might find that AI's wit Could speak in ways that sound like common sense, But lacks the depth of art's true recompense.

This is a great example of a clearly very bad poem that would sound "good enough" to people. Some things rhyme, but there's very clearly no plan.

That definition covers 90% of popular hip-hop, pop and r&b.

I would argue that 99% of popular songs have fairly poor quality lyrics (though it doesn't really matter with regard to artistic merit of the finished product). Singer-songwriters in folk-adjacent genres such as Joni Mitchell, Sufjan Stevens, and Don McLean come closest to actual poetry IMHO.

Yeah, the 1st, 2nd, and 4th, lines are very clunky and sound horrible read aloud with oddly placed syllables. The "view" and "choose" rhyme is horrible (the 3rd line's first rhyme is barely a rhyme at all). The line breaks are just as bad with poor examples of enjambment.

Do you think this is a good poem by any measure? Imo it is terrible.

I think that most people would call it a good poem due to its rhyming and simplistic structure.

It’s definitely not Beowulf. I’m not a poetry expert, but even I can tell it’s at something like a 5th grade level.

Was this with a Vogon plugin?

No. Straight ChatGPT. I wasn’t even logged in.

Hmm, I’m not convinced. That’s just the comment in the guise of poetry. There are a bunch of dangling implications in this “poem” where a real master would weave the implications together.

I guess I’d also say it is not only doing the right thing that counts, one must also be doing it for the right reason.

AI “art” is mimicry, burdened by the inevitable mundanity of the majority of its training corpus. The avant garde remains exclusively the domain of a comparative handful of forward thinking humans, in my humble opinion.

Or said another way: AI art is kitschy, and I don’t think it can escape it.

“Kitschy”. Seems like a perfect word for that!

This is great, much better than expected. ChatGPT makes LLMs venerated.

> I don't read much myself, I must admit,

Just a boorish observation: It had a golden opportunity to weave the word `shit` in there and yet it did not.

Just for fun, I also rewrote the comment as a poem:

  Perhaps my logic flounders, but I'm unconvinced
  That popular opinion can be the test
  Of how we should judge our culture's best.

  Can we who think that poetry's a bore,
  And haven't even read five score,
  Place ourselves above those who adore?

  I laugh at memes and share the swill.
  Of course I like the muck and fill
  At the bottom of the hill.

It's completely ideal to get an average person's opinion on something as primal as poetry.

Poetry is for everyone, not just poetry connoisseurs. It's a simplified primal expression of language, taking the form of pretty soundbites & snippets, pristine, virginal, uncorrupted by prose and overthinking. Poetry is not the domain of middlebrow academics.

I used to think that, but I think this is only true if you want to measure broad market appeal. Very few things are broadly marketable, and many of them have niches. "Middlebrow academics" are the ones who go to the poetry shelf of their local bookstore and pick up anthologies and they are the ones who go to poetry slams, and so on.

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