Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 285.
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        Date: 2024-12-18 21:28:37+00:00
        From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.280: AI, poetry and readers

Thanks for the response, Tim. I think I have an idea about how to advance
our conversation. It may involve a different way of thinking about AI
generated text.

But first, I was referring to Derrida's 1958 Introduction to Husserl's
Origins of Geometry. Reading it made me want to write something about the
importance of the triangle in western philosophy, which goes back to
Socrates. I can't find the full text online. I might have a .pdf somewhere
I can send you.

Now, here's the crux of the matter, as I understand it, for you:

"But, [with AI] there was no mind involved in the generation of this text;
there were no words written down; there was no Shakespeare forming the
words and writing them down for us to read, and interpret, long after
Shakespeare's mind is gone."

My previous response to that was that the origin doesn't matter because we
don't have the mind present. We both agree that a mind originates humanly
written words, while in the case of AI there is no mind present for that
specific arrangement of words, but my response was that at the interpretive
end, mind is equally absent in both cases. That answer wasn't satisfactory
to you, so you reasserted the difference that an originary, human,
intentional mind makes for the meaning of words. That is a romantic notion
to me. In practical terms, the work of interpretation is the same, because
it is word-based.

But, here's where I'd like to suggest a different idea: words themselves
are the product of human minds. Patterns of words are the product of human
minds. AI generates text that follows statistically probable patterns of
words *in response to a human prompt, and the source text for that
statistically probable response consists of words** already produced by
human minds*. AI generated text is modeled on human minds and human
word-output.

So while the AI itself doesn't have a mind, the AI arrangement of text
is *indirectly
*the product of human minds. AI can't write anything that I'm aware of that
doesn't have some pre-existing pattern. I'm curious what would happen if we
asked it to invent a new form of poetry? I've innovated a couple short
poetic forms myself.

Those sonnets recently posted to this list were rather good and could have
plausibly been written by a human. But AI didn't come up with them out of
nowhere. I might think the human being who wrote them was a kind of tool,
but then human beings reduce themselves to tools all of the time. And they
were "rather good." They weren't great. They weren't self-reflective,
self-critical, advancing the conversation. They didn't force us to
reconsider the values being expressed. They were following conventions.
People do that all of the time. The world is full of minor poets. AI is at
least a competent poet.

I don't believe I could have this conversation with an AI. It would need
prompts from me, not responses. So I'm not saying AI and human beings are
interchangable. I'm only talking about short, discreet, literary products
such as poems.

Jim R


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