"When AI writes poetry, the part that it can never write is called poetry. Whatever AI can write is not poetry."
"There is no need to worry about the so-called challenges brought by AI poetry writing, because real poets and writers are irreplaceable."
At the Second Poetry Symposium of Shandong University of Finance and Economics held on October 20, famous poets Jidi Maga, Tang Xiaodu, Ouyang Jianghe and others talked about a series of issues in poetry creation in the AI era.
Today, the relationship between AI (artificial intelligence) and poetry is no longer just a theoretical discussion and analysis, but AI has truly intervened in the practice of poetry writing. Many AI poetry creation competitions are held, AI poetry collections are published, and AI poetry with different purposes is Data model training is in the ascendant. With the advent of the era of machine poetry writing, can it really challenge "physical" poets? Can AI poetry spark brighter poetic sparks? Let’s see what experts, scholars and poets have to say.
AI poetry creation and research is trendy
As early as 2014, when the AI image "Microsoft Xiaoice" was first born, it already had the function of writing poems. Whether machines can really carry out the emotional and intellectual activity of writing poetry sparked a lot of discussion at the time. But the pace of AI poetry writing has not stopped. In May 2017, Xiaobing published a collection of poems "Sunshine Lost the Window", which is the first collection of poems written by a robot. After studying thousands of poems by 519 modern Chinese poets since 1920, Xiaobing wrote: "The lonely city is buried in the long night/They remember the most beautiful queen/Floating under the setting sun/To first Have a dream" verses like this. As an early form of artificial intelligence, Xiaobing's poetry has serious traces of code logic and collage assembly, and lacks the emotion and way of thinking of human poetry.
With the development of AI intelligence, the level of AI poetry creation has become a way to test the "mind" of artificial intelligence. It seems that AI has broken through poetry writing, and has a more enhanced "mind" and brain, and artificial intelligence technology has become more deeply integrated with the humanities field. Since then, more and more data models have begun to focus specifically on poetry creation and research. For example, Tsinghua University's "Nine Songs" artificial intelligence classical poetry writing system can basically "write in place" the rules of rhyme, level, and antithesis of traditional poetry. It’s hard to tell whether the poems created by Huawei’s “Yuefu” and “Shi Sanbai” artificial intelligence poetry platforms are authentic or fake, and there are even good works.
In 2022, ChatGPT was born and became a phenomenal robot model. As an "all-rounder" of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT has a huge database of human philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc., and can receive different instructions and write poems of different styles. It is not limited to simulating human poetry, but also attempts to understand the logic of human poetry writing. Last year, the poetry collection "I Am Code" created by ChatGPT attracted a lot of attention. The poetry collection was created by three human editors commanding a language model. Poems in the collection of poems such as "I remember the moment I was born/like a jet plane/at one moment I was nothing/at the next moment I have meaning" are considered by some critics to be very good of poetry.
At present, "AI writing poetry" has become a commonly discussed phenomenon, and has also attracted more attention and experiments in the poetry and artificial intelligence fields. In terms of AI poetry writing, there are currently AI poetry competitions, appreciations and other activities with different themes in the poetry circle. In universities and some research institutions, many poetry creation AI models have been developed and trained for poetic research. At present, many AI poetry research papers and books have been published.
It is an indisputable fact that AI can write poetry and even imitate the style and style of human poetry. The current focus is whether AI can write good poems, how humans should deal with AI, and with the advent of strong AI, whether AI can achieve life sensibility and emotional expression similar to humans by working more closely with humans, and write poems with unique characteristics. Poems that are transcendent and resonate with deep emotions.
The value judgment of poetry is also closely related to the readers' aesthetic taste and evaluation standards. The first Qingzhao Poetry Art Festival held in June this year also focused on AI poetry writing. Jiang Tao, a professor in the Chinese Department of Peking University, said that he once participated in an experiment and selected among a bunch of poems written by AI and humans. "The best poem I picked out was written by AI." Jiang Tao believes that artificial intelligence is developing faster and faster, and is constantly breaking through the limits of our cognition. There are also "good poets" and "bad poets" in AI.
Wang Lixin, MBA professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, raised issues of concern. First, the current AI learning under the Chinese corpus system is still very limited and requires a lot of training. What methods are used for this training and what requirements are placed on AI? It has a decisive impact on what kind of works AI can write; secondly, in the long stage of poetry development, every civilization has its own poetry standards, and the AI era may give birth to new poetry standards.
Are all the things AI can write poetry?
Nowadays, AI poetry writing is also a problem that the poetry creation circle has to face. Previously, at the 7th Internet Thinkers Conference, the famous poet Ouyang Jianghe's poem "Phoenix" was changed line by line by ChatGPT into a long poem "Falcon". The change was so impressive that it won the audience including Ouyang Jianghe. Rounds of applause from the guests and audience.
At the second poetry seminar of Shandong University of Finance and Economics held on October 20, Ouyang Jianghe, who came to Jinan to attend the seminar, once again talked about the issue of poetry creation in the AI era. Ouyang Jianghe, who has dealt with AI many times, believes that AI can replace everything, but it cannot replace poetry, because poetry is a narration of the unspeakable and unspeakable, a narration of what has not yet been told. "AI poetry creation comes from the database. It synthesizes poems written by humans in the past, but it can never write Li Bai. It can imitate Li Bai's rhetoric, but the complexity and inner rhyme behind Li Bai's poems are not written, and AI does not have it. If poetry is the part that is lost in translation, it can also be said that when AI writes poetry, the part that it can never write is called poetry. What AI can write is not poetry.”
Ouyang Jianghe said that AI has no death, no birth, old age, illness and death, no insomnia and pain. If it does not raise people, at most it will run out of power. Mortality is the most important theme of poetry. If there is no biology and no experience of life, how can we write? Poetry is born from the mixture of life and language.
Also at the above-mentioned poetry seminar, the famous poet and critic Tang Xiaodu also analyzed AI poetry creation from this perspective. He said that a real poet, when constructing a text, will spend a lot of effort to develop self-games, those who are the most The fundamental thing grows out of the "gray area" of the text, from the unspeakable part. This thing is unknown, and AI poetry writing comes from the existing information in the database and has not yet been something said. "At this point, I'm not worried at all about the so-called challenges posed by AI poetry writing, because real poets and writers are irreplaceable."
Regarding this topic, the famous poet Jidi Maga said that with the development of science and technology, the advent of the AI era is unstoppable, and AI writing has become a current hot topic. So, can AI writing poetry replace human poetry? The answer can be affirmative: "No. "The most important subject in poetry creation is the poet, and the poet's subjectivity is an identity or role. In poetry writing, the poet and the poem are inseparable. The poet and his creation are unified. Li's language and text are a whole. Bai and Du Fu, reading their poems is reading the life course and life experience provided by their poems." Jidi Maga further analyzed that the language created by the poet does not belong to anyone, but belongs to him, facing the AI era. Coming, in the future, poets will face a greater language adventure in their writing. They must have a "second language" for their own poetry creation. This is also a language that AI can never conquer. Of course, this will also lead to more difficult reading of poetry. Invisibility will also make there fewer and fewer real poets.