The Claude output in the first one-shot counterexample attempt is hilarious. I hate its writing most of the time but this stuff is next level deep-fried slop.
> And the control column confirms the resonance-necessity conjecture empirically: break the skeleton alignment and the joint kernel dies at the constrained window, exactly as the transversality heuristic predicted.
> The den has air in it.
> Drift fuel exists.
Discovering that poetry was cognitive compression is alone one of the latent findings LLMs unlocked.
You can so easily imagine this shit being read in a 90s slam poetry coffeehouse. Trust me I was there
I had a manic friend in college who later became a Emmy-winning television writer. One night over a quarter century ago, he stayed up about 24 hours straight doing nothing but writing, completely free form, some of it prose, some structured rhyme, some of it dialogue with stage directions. He pinned it to his dorm walls like it was wallpaper for a week, then we took it out to the field and burned it. The surviving paper that didn't burn made up bizarre strings of words that sounded much like this, which he retyped and called it poetry. It totally worked.
This sort of thing is why STEM students need more humanities classes. The idea that poetry is semantically denser than prose is, like, obvious, to anybody who cares about poetry.
I never got the point of poetry, even after giving it an honest shot many times. It felt far too compressed to express any thing. I could not separate it from how I would appreciate music. Maybe its because I don't start from the same base as others.
You are right, maybe some humanities classes would've helped or I'm just wired this way.
It's pretty similar to music, yeah. Or perhaps music can be similar to poetry. Just this morning I was re-reading the lyrics for "Pale Green Things" & "Woke Up New" by The Mountain Goats. There's a sort of specificity in intention that the form tends to end up dictating, that can really carry a rich emotional context or metaphor more directly into the listener's brain.
(Of course, prose is sort of like a superset of poetry - it's not a hard dividing line. You may find especially poetic lines in your favorite longform works, especially in good fiction books.)
I do think that many English teachers do a poor job of encouraging a love, or even understanding, of poetry. One of my highschool teachers was in love almost with categorizing the forms of poetry - sonnets and sestets and villanelles, and seemed to think that if we learned the rules about what lines had to rhyme or which syllables to stress, we'd enjoy poetry. I hated it! But then the next year, even against this backdrop of learned avoidance, my teacher was so in love with the ability of poetry to communicate - the unfolding of a few words into meaning like a flower in bloom - something clicked. He focused almost not at all on the structure of poetry, but rather on finding works that spoke to you. I'm still not a lover of poetry, even now, but I have poems I appreciate.
Not what I was actually pointing to, but thanks; I'll pass the critique along to my old MA thesis advisor. ;)
>one of the latent findings LLMs unlocked
Either I really misunderstood high school English classes or this is what poems have always been known to do.
That makes perfect sense. Using language in unorthodox ways to convey very specific concepts that only make sense to you and sound like bullshit to others.
I never expected a machine to be better at articulating complex thoughts with a spare number of semantic coordinates, but then I never expected to find out that my poetry was golfing in the latent space
Absolute bad-metaphor-laden slop, in a dramatic writerly voice. These LLMs are trained on too much pretentious writing.
Nit, I know, but I don't think they are trained on too much pretentious writing so much as they are RLHF'd into it because that writing impresses people.