The more we see artificial intelligence develop, the more of an impact it seems to have in every area of life. In education, art, science, and technology, AI has made a mark and is now in some way integrated into each of these fields.
Dr. Dorie Larue is a creative writing professor at LSU in Shreveport. She says she is already integrating AI into her creative writing classes, including poetry made by artificial intelligence.
“Some of the worst things that you can attribute to creative writing are the sins of AI.”
When you ask an artificial intelligence system to make a poem for you, it is most likely a generative AI program. Thus, in the context of poetry, it will generate a poem based on poems put into its database. Dr. Larue says this is a problem for multiple reasons. One reason is that usually these poems in the system’s database were taken without the consent of the poet.
“They train on excellent writers and a lot of writers and artists are starting to complain that they’re seeing their work," Dr. Larue says.
Another issue is that the system will generate something that appeals to the masses, and according to Dr. Larue, the masses typically favor works that only have a surface-level meaning.
“So, the masses like rhymey stuff. They like this pronounced rhythm, easy to remember," Dr. Larue says. "And, if you give a beginning class of creative writing… if you give them two poems and one of them is bad and one of them is good, the reason they like the bad one is they know what it means right away.”
In those first level creative writing classes, Dr. Larue says there is very little for which she wants students to use AI.
“Well, one, you can teach students how not to write poetry with it.”
Other instructors might allow students to use AI to brainstorm ideas. However, Dr. Larue disagrees with this method. She says that coming up with ideas is an important skill for writers to develop.
“That’s part of the creative process, is students getting their own ideas," she says. "So, they need to learn to look at life and listen to conversations, and they don’t need somebody just to cough out ideas to them.”
Dr. Larue says she also takes issue with the speed at which AI produces poetry. Because it can “cough” it up for a user, Dr. Larue says that it usually misses the point of poetry.
“It can’t. It’ll even admit that," Dr. Larue says. "Because, on one of my slides, I said, ‘What is it about AI creative writing that just doesn’t fulfill the art of poetry?’ And they said, ‘Well, we don’t have the human experience.’”
According to Dr. Larue, the human voice is crucial to excellent, effective poetry. This means there needs to be some aspect or experience that humans can relate to or at least recognize in a work. Since AI lacks this quality, it’s easy to distinguish what’s been generated.
Generally, Dr. Larue says she believes AI lacks all of the good and necessary requirements that make good poetry.
“I don’t know what, in poetry, is the thing that saves it, I think. We have to work at it sometimes, and we have to have a level of educated understanding to start with in order to understand the great art,” Dr. Larue says.
In her experience, AI does not have this understanding, with the exception of one poem she read. The poem, dubbed “Electric Cradle,” was generated by a Chinese AI system. Interestingly, it was given the prompt: “Write a heart-rending piece of free-form poetry about what it means to be an AI.” While it still lacks a human voice, Dr. Larue says it comes very close.
Despite this poem, Dr. Larue says she doubts that AI can come close to being a threat to human poetry. She says AI is a tool that offers many possibilities, but poetry isn’t one of them.
“In a way, the tools have a way to revolutionize the way content is created and dealt with and consumed, and it offers us a lot," she says. "But, it’s not going to replace us. I don’t think poets have to worry at all.”
This is Alaina Atnip with Red River Radio News.