Ai cannot "write better poetry than you" unless you reduce poetry to random arrangements of words that you think sound nice. Unless you think that the semantic content of poetry is totally irrelevant. Unless you think that language is still language when it doesn't convey meaning or have any semantic content at all.
In the sense that an ai can produce a novel arrangement of words, and we reduce poetry to novel arrangements of words? But language isn't reproducing noises. A lyre bird is not talking or communicating or capable of speech. It's just repeating things it's heard with no understanding of what those things are. We are not lyre birds.
Dadaism and it's consequences have been a disaster for human civilization.
Also, I disagree with your definition of poetry as, apparently "Any novel combination of words including those without semantic meaning". At some point you need to draw a distinction between "poetry" and "any utterance" or the term becomes pointless.
If meaningless arrangements of words based on their statistical prevalence in a dataset is poetry then what isn't?
this is kinda verbal sleight of hand imo. i'm not here to argue or to defend ai, just gonna chime in real quick.
when you say "meaningless" up there, you mean there is no intent behind the text. but calling a text "meaningless" would usually imply "text that does not make sense or contain information."
if you read a poem and you feel something, and you can imagine the scene, then that poem meant something to you, no matter how it came to exist. the poem held information that you parsed and felt.
imo we should be careful not to mix up statements about the act of writing and the output of writing. ambiguity like that leads to endless disagreement and frustration in discussions.
also:
chatgpt has never felt or lived, but it has processed lots of writing from humans who have felt and lived. we could argue those people are the real authors of whatever chatgpt writes. chatgpt is an algorithm for imitating and remixing what humans have written before. so even if your point is "text cannot have meaning unless a human wrote it" then chatgpt still kinda passes the test. kinda.
this is just an aside though. my main point was earlier.
Ai cannot "write better poetry than you" unless you reduce poetry to random arrangements of words that you think sound nice. Unless you think that the semantic content of poetry is totally irrelevant. Unless you think that language is still language when it doesn't convey meaning or have any semantic content at all.
In the sense that an ai can produce a novel arrangement of words, and we reduce poetry to novel arrangements of words? But language isn't reproducing noises. A lyre bird is not talking or communicating or capable of speech. It's just repeating things it's heard with no understanding of what those things are. We are not lyre birds.
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Dadaism and it's consequences have been a disaster for human civilization.
Also, I disagree with your definition of poetry as, apparently "Any novel combination of words including those without semantic meaning". At some point you need to draw a distinction between "poetry" and "any utterance" or the term becomes pointless.
If meaningless arrangements of words based on their statistical prevalence in a dataset is poetry then what isn't?
this is kinda verbal sleight of hand imo. i'm not here to argue or to defend ai, just gonna chime in real quick.
when you say "meaningless" up there, you mean there is no intent behind the text. but calling a text "meaningless" would usually imply "text that does not make sense or contain information."
if you read a poem and you feel something, and you can imagine the scene, then that poem meant something to you, no matter how it came to exist. the poem held information that you parsed and felt.
imo we should be careful not to mix up statements about the act of writing and the output of writing. ambiguity like that leads to endless disagreement and frustration in discussions.
also:
chatgpt has never felt or lived, but it has processed lots of writing from humans who have felt and lived. we could argue those people are the real authors of whatever chatgpt writes. chatgpt is an algorithm for imitating and remixing what humans have written before. so even if your point is "text cannot have meaning unless a human wrote it" then chatgpt still kinda passes the test. kinda.
this is just an aside though. my main point was earlier.