Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 262.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Fishwick, Paul <Paul.Fishwick@utdallas.edu>
Subject: Fred The Heretic, Poet (25)
[2] From: scholar-at-large@bell.net <scholar-at-large@bell.net>
Subject: A. I. Richards (41)
[3] From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.261: AI poet with a mind of its own? (37)
[4] From: Robert A Amsler <robert.amsler@utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.261: AI poet with a mind of its own? (49)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2024-11-29 20:17:47+00:00
From: Fishwick, Paul <Paul.Fishwick@utdallas.edu>
Subject: Fred The Heretic, Poet
Dear Colleagues @ Humanist:
We have worked with Fred Turner, poet, for the past few months, to create an
OpenAI custom GPT that we call “FredTheHeretic” or FTH, for short. We now have
two graduate students (Priya and Mihir) working on the project, which we call
The CyberPoetry project.
You can find FTH by searching through GPTs, or directly here:
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-XmhqgURbv-fredtheheretic-fth
If you have any questions or critiques, we would love to hear them. We will be
publishing as we move forward.
My only suggestion, emphasized in the help section, is to be precise with your
prompts. See the example prompts given when you start FTH.
Paul Fishwick, Ph.D.
Distinguished Chair Emeritus of Arts, Humanities, and Technology
(AHT<https://aht.utdallas.edu/>)
Former Professor of Computer Science (UF<https://www.cise.ufl.edu/> and
UTD<https://cs.utdallas.edu/>)
CEO Metaphorz, LLC (Consulting)
Email: metaphorz@gmail.com<mailto:metaphorz@gmail.com>
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2024-11-29 19:17:04+00:00
From: scholar-at-large@bell.net <scholar-at-large@bell.net>
Subject: A. I. Richards
Willard
This may be of interest to those working in machine learning. It was created by
Leonardo Flores
[cite]
Preface to Principles of Cyborg Criticism by A. I. Richards
This book was inspired by a brief conversation with Ted Underwood on Bluesky
responding to a study that as Ted summarized it found that “non-expert readers
prefer AI generated poetry to the classics” and cited famed New Critic I. A.
Richards and the gulf between expert and non-expert readers. My punny playful
response “AI Richards?” led him to elaborate with an idea that is at the heart
of this generated book: “We should create it! A language model that is convinced
no human readers really understand poetry.”
[/cite]
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2024/issues/27
<https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2024/issues/27>
Both the transcript of the dialogue between machine and human and the end
product are available.
The book begins:
[cite]
A book is a machine to think with, but in this age of accelerating collaboration
between human ingenuity and artificial intelligence, it might better be likened
to a hybrid engine—drawing on human creativity to fuel the computational drive
of a new era of understanding. This book, in particular, aims to chart the
tangled and treacherous terrain of literary criticism in a time when both human
and machine voices clamor for meaning. It is an attempt to re-weave not only
raveled parts of our civilization but also the threads of human and artificial
cognition into a fabric resilient enough for the future of literature.
[/cite]
Enjoy
François Lachance
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2024-11-29 16:08:21+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.261: AI poet with a mind of its own?
I think they're good parodies that could generally pass for being written
by a human being. What makes formal poetry less detectable as AI than
student papers is that meter and rhyme are predetermined, and when you're
writing a parody, certain word choices are also predetermined.
I've read plenty of parody poems that read just like those.
Jim R
On Fri, Nov 29, 2024 at 3:44 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> Willard has talked of how AI are minds of their own kind and need to be
> understood in such terms. This post speaks to that in an oblique way. I
> asked
> Claude 3.5 Sonnet to produce three parodies of “Kuala Khan.” The poems it
> produced are bad poems, which is what I expected. But it seems to me that
> they
> are bad in a way that no half-way decent human poet would produce.
>
> Bill B
>
> https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/11/claude-parodies-kubla-khan-using-
> elon.html
> <https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/11/claude-parodies-kubla-khan-using-
elon.html>
>
> --
Dr. James Rovira <http://www.jamesrovira.com/>
- *David Bowie and Romanticism
<https://jamesrovira.com/2022/09/02/david-bowie-and-romanticism/>*,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
- *Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism
<https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-Rock-Women-in-Romanticism-The-
Emancipation-of-Female-Will/Rovira/p/book/9781032069845>*,
Routledge, 2023
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2024-11-29 14:13:33+00:00
From: Robert A Amsler <robert.amsler@utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.261: AI poet with a mind of its own?
AI software has no concept of what it is producing. It at present only
attempts to replicate the grammar and stylistics it encounters in original
works it analyzes. I suspect the human designers have no concept of the
intent of the original work. That would require a major effort to create a
model of what the original work was attempting to express. Such an effort
could be attempted, but I doubt it could be built to scale. One could
presumably ask an AI program to explain the reasoning in an original work.
It might be possible to do this for some works--but humans have more
background knowledge of what has been said about the original text. Asking
the AI software to interpret what has been said about the original work by
reading the all mentions of the original work in other texts might come
close to appearing to express what humans have said about the work. I think
it would still fail to make new observations. I don't think AI's at present
will be doing much more than explaining what humans have previously said
back to us.
On Fri, Nov 29, 2024 at 3:44 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 261.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2024-11-28 19:52:41+00:00
> From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com>
> Subject: NEW SAVANNA: Claude parodies “Kubla Khan” using Elon
> Musk, FDR, and Walt Disney as subjects
>
> Willard has talked of how AI are minds of their own kind and need to be
> understood in such terms. This post speaks to that in an oblique way. I
> asked
> Claude 3.5 Sonnet to produce three parodies of “Kuala Khan.” The poems it
> produced are bad poems, which is what I expected. But it seems to me that
> they
> are bad in a way that no half-way decent human poet would produce.
>
> Bill B
>
> https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/11/claude-parodies-kubla-khan-using-
> elon.html
> <https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/11/claude-parodies-kubla-khan-using-
elon.html>
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