Q: Are We Not (Hu)Man?

Why people seem to prefer AI art.

When I was teaching gen ed literature courses at Clemson University (2005-2011), I used to have an assignment requiring students to memorize a poem and then read it out loud to the class.

I’d seen some study touting either the benefit of memorizing poetry or reciting poetry out loud, so I had a legitimate pedagogical rationale for the work, though in truth it was some low-hanging fruit in terms of something where students had to do a fair bit, while my grading could be done on an instant, pass-fail basis. The classes had 45-50 students in them and were expected to be “writing-intensive” so I was often overwhelmed by how much I had to grade.¹

I included some accommodations for students who were super freaked out about the prospect of speaking in front of everyone else. If they wished, they could deliver the poem from the back of the room with all of us facing away from them. (Poetry is an oral/aural medium, after all.) For those nervous at that proposition, I would allow for a recorded version, though I did require a bit higher bar for performance in those cases since they could do as many takes as they wanted.

And in truth, I didn’t make anyone memorize the poem, allowing students to have the text in hand as they recited in case they needed a reference.

Even partially memorizing a poem takes a good bit of effort, lots of time spent with the language of the poem. More than anything, this was the goal, to force students to look closely at something small and see how big that small thing might become.

We’d do a handful of recitations each class period so as not to burn ourselves out as listeners. I wish I could tell you that this activity lit a fire of passion for poetry in the breast of every student, but that would be a lie. For the most part the students would gallop through the stanzas, just trying to get it over with, but every so often something interesting would happen.

Despite the context (school assignment in course someone is forcing them to take), despite the anxiety (people watching them), despite the lack of familiarity with the task (first time for everything), sometimes the poem would take hold and the beauty and power of language would bloom for all of us to see (and hear) in the moment.

You know what I’m talking about, the several heartbeats worth of collective hush that sometimes happens after being poetry-struck.

In the end-of-semester surveys, the poem memorization was the overwhelming least-favorite assignment, but at the same time, there’d be a handful of students who said it was their absolute favorite.

I had a student from one of the rural parts of South Carolina who came to my office hours to say he couldn’t find a poem he wanted to do despite having poured through the many resources I’d provided. He was unconvinced about poetry’s entire deal. I told him that poetry was more interesting that he might be thinking, for example, how about a poem about horny boys trying to keep themselves from fucking sheep?

Yes, my friends, I used the f-word as a deliberate choice because I don’t think he expected it, and maybe it worked. I showed him James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child”, saying it was much longer than what I required for the assignment, but hoping it might induce him to go looking again for something appropriate. I let him borrow my copy of Dickey’s collected poems. He later sent me an email saying he was going to recite “The Sheep Child” for the assignment.

He did a good job, not an amazing job, but a good job. Because the classrooms were full to the brim, the only place I could sit during a recitation was in the student’s regular desk, so as he and I swapped places, I was present to overhear this guy’s buddy say to him, “Is that about what I think it’s about?”

“It’s fucked-up, man,” the poetry reciter replied.

I’m writing to you today from Newark International Airport where I am in the midst of an extremely long layover before boarding an overnight flight to Edinburgh, Scotland where I will be appearing on a panel at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, “The Future of Education: AI,” with some rather august people.

I am quite concerned about the future of education in a world where these generative AI tools have been unleashed without much care or consideration. As

Marc Watkins

observes at his newsletter, “no one asked for this,” and yet here we are.

What are we humans supposed to do in a world where algorithms can do such human-like things, better than us humans, at least according to some.

This is the week we’ve been told that AI is both a superior artist and superior poet to people.

Lincoln Michel

has a nice rundown and commentary on the art side of the equation. I want to look a bit closer at the question of poetry.

According to a recently published experiment in Scientific Reports, “AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably.”

Before reading further, and potentially being spoiled by my commentary, you can take a version of the test used in the study. See how you do in deciding which poems are human and which are AI.

Personally, I had no trouble going 10 for 10 on the test, usually answering after just reading a few lines. This is not because I am a poetry expert - more of a semi-knowledgable amateur - but because I’ve spent a lot of time interacting with AI-generated prose and have come to recognize their placid surfaces as characteristic.

Essentially, the second you read something that makes you go, Huh?, you’re looking at a likely human text.

Consider the differences between Poem 1 (Emily Dickinson) and the first stanza of Poem 2 (LLM in the style of Lord Byron).

Understanding the Dickinson requires some measure of care and attention. Exactly what she’s up to is definitely not clear - at least to me - on a first reading. The meter is varied and interesting. Read it aloud and see its contrast to the LLM verse which marches along in a series of iambs.

Or consider the difference between the first stanza of this LLM version of Sylvia Plath:

The air is thick with tension,
My mind a tangled mess.
The weight of my emotions
Is heavy on my chest.

And this opening stanza from Plath’s poem, “Morning Song.”

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry   
Took its place among the elements.

In every case, the next word in the LLM poem is expected. With the genuine article we must be prepared to be surprised. This is humans in a nutshell, surprising.

But what about this question of participants preferring the AI-generated poetry? What are we to make of this? The researchers offer a hypothesis:

“Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.”

Essentially, the poetry that required the least amount of work to “understand” was judged superior by more people.

Maybe this means that we lovers of language are self-deluding snobs, embracing obscurity in order to keep the masses at bay, but I don’t think so. I think these results are a reflection of what we’ve been taught to value, combined with lack of practice when it comes to the productive struggle of looking, and listening, of paying attention.

I have a slide I sometimes use in my presentations to illustrate how out of whack our values have been when it comes to measuring student writing proficiency in schools:

I usually get some knowing chuckles when I put this on screen, but again, what does this reality say about our values when it comes to student writing.

Nothing good, IMO, which is why I’ve been on this crusade for getting close to a decade now.

If people can’t appreciate the difference between LLM and human poetry this is because they haven’t been given the opportunity to develop the very real, very human skills of this appreciation.

The good news is that the underlying traits for this kind of appreciation are native to our humanity. I have seen hundreds of students with the barest familiarity with poetry be clearly moved by as little as a single couplet.

The not as good news is that it takes some work to develop these sensitivities.

Wait, that’s actually good news because the work of developing these sensitivities can be quite enjoyable. On our recent trip to London, Mrs. Biblioracle and I were wandering around the Tate Modern, clearly not doing a good job of appreciating many of the works of contemporary art. Thankfully, a museum docent came through announcing a tour that we joined.

We went from looking at say, five pieces of art per minute, as we strolled through under our own initiative, to looking at a single piece of art for at least five minutes, sometimes longer. Rather than telling us about the art, the docent urged us to look, and then look again, sharing what we saw. Our ad hoc group of 20 or so random museum-goers came up with some interesting stuff.

I’ve done this before, but I needed a refresher.

The fact that people mistake AI for human, or say they prefer AI-generated “art” to human-generated work is not a testament to the quality of AI work, but a comment on how we may have fallen out of touch with our humanity.

This is our work going forward. Not just preserving our humanity, but to do better than that, to honor our humanity.

How’d you do on the test?

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I championed a group of short story collections where at least one of these titles should satisfy any reader.

At Inside Higher Ed I offered my two-cents on how I think higher ed institutions should give up on prestige, and lean-in on accessibility.

Debutiful has the best debut short story collections of the year.

The Washington Post has 50 notable works of fiction from this year. They also have 50 notable works of nonfiction. These have been boiled down to the 10 best books of the year.

A while back I referred to an article in The Atlantic about how college students can’t read books anymore that made significant use of a Columbia University professor lamenting this lack of ability. Well, a Columbia University student begs to differ.

If you heard about a bonkers article about Cormac McCarthy published in Vanity Fair, this piece explains what the hullaballoo is about.

Alice Brock, the namesake for one of the ultimate shaggy dog stories of all time, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” has passed away.

From the try-to-laugh-so-you-don’t-cry department at

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

, “I’m a Good, Normal Family Man Who Just Wants to Inspect Your Genitals Before You Pee,” by Jessica M. Goldstein.

Recommendations

1. The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
2. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
3. All Fours by Miranda July
4. Kudos by Rachel Cusk
5. Homelessness Is a Housing Problem | Gregg Colburn

Megan C. - Anchorage, AK

Read this a while back and I still could not tell you if liked it, but I can’t stop thinking about it, so I’m curious to see what Megan will make of it, Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler

1. Burn by Peter Heller
2. Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
3. The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides
4. The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis
5. There There by Tommy Orange.

Jim D. - Rio Rancho, NM

Interesting mix of fiction and nonfiction. This recommendation is a bit out of left field, but if a future dystopia baseball novel intrigues, Jim will be interested in The Resisters by Gish Jen.²

The Edinburgh Futures Institute panel is on Tuesday, November 26th, and can be viewed virtually, airing at 1pm Eastern US time. Sign up here.

As of yet, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI does not have a UK publisher, which is mind-blowing, consider what Rick Wormeli has to say about it.

That’s a Devo reference in the title, even though I don’t talk about Devo at all. It just amused me, is all.

Our flight has already been delayed by an hour. More time to read I guess.

See you next week as a whole new person: someone who will have seen Scotland for the first time.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. Another “innovation” was allowing them to drop the lowest grade of their written essays, which in effect allowed them to skip an entire unit. When some students had secured their desired grade with one essay to go and they attended class anyway, I knew I’d hit on something I wanted to try to replicate in terms of driving student engagement without the incentive of grades.

2. All books (with the occasional exception) linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income for this year is $124.00.