FWIW, the best source of GPT-3 poetry, if you want to see what it can do beyond the cursory discussion in OP, remains my own https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#poetry page. (Pointing out, among other things, that GPT-3 can't rhyme and so Andrew Brown's sample is a bit misleading about capabilities.) I'm surprised it's neither mentioned nor linked, since there is not that much GPT-3 poetry out there...
OP argues that GPT-3's poems 'fall dead' and never become 'a memorable unity'. I will just say that for me, a number of GPT-3's poems like "Uber-Poem" (https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#uber-poem) or "The Universe Is A Glitch" (https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#the-universe-is-a-glitch) struck me as a good deal more lively and memorable than the vast majority of the poems I puzzle through reading the New Yorker or Paris Review.
I read them and they are impressive and memorable - because they were generated by a computer. If a person wrote them they would be very unremarkable; nothing about them would stand out, in insight or language or form. What is remarkable is that a computer generated text that is passable as human poetry. If a high schooler or non-artistic college student wrote them, I wouldn't be surprised.
(Also, and maybe I'm too literal here, if poems are seen as 'puzzles', that will miss the point for 99% of them.)
You're right. The first poem is complete nonsense as expected. The second poem first half could be absolutely fascinating, but completely devolved into nonsense too.
Perhaps using this gpt3 stuff for poetry could start you off like a writing prompt.
Does the Turing test contemplate that the person doing the evaluation should not be wary they are performing one?
I would falsely classify some of my fast-typing family members and friends as bots due to the high amount of grammar mistakes or failure to respond in full to a set of questions.
I was using puzzle in a double-sense: that they were puzzles rather than art, and that I was puzzled that with an entire world of poetry to choose from they chose these, in which I could find such little merit.
As for highschooler/college poetry, you must've read some pretty amazing selections if you'd rate those as the norm.
It depends on the poem. It's not a tool (and of course even tools have many uses, including uses for which they weren't intended) or a project, with some defined purpose.
Many, encountering poems, understandably don't know what to do next. It's outside their experience. It's not a puzzle or a secret code; much of the poetry of the past was the popular art of its day, before recorded and broadcast arts. Everyone read it, if they could read. If John Lennon had been an artist in the 19th century, and could only play music for the people in a small room and wanted to convey their vision much ore widely, wouldn't poetry be a way to convey it? Publish a book and reach the world. What would Lennon write if restricted only to words? Imagine what Lennon would put into each syllable, trying to say it all without a note of an instrument, without even the intonation of a voice.
So read it. Don't be fooled by its length - it's nothing at all like other text with the same number of words - but be patient, give it time as if it was a short story. Be curious, explore it, explore the mind behind it and its vision, completely independent of yours (put your own aside completely - you are interested in them for this moment). I've read much poetry and it often is obscure to start - in fact, the first reading usually is just basic familiarization - and it reveals itself more and more as I explore it. It can be a transportive experience.
I like Tolstoy's conclusion in What is Art?, which I'm doing an injustice by summarizing as "universal emotional communication" which is contrasted with paid work, technical prowess, esoteric work, formulaic-derivative or pure aesthetics - anything that requires effort and "cultivation" to understand is not art.
> anything that requires effort and "cultivation" to understand is not art.
Tolstoy said that? Where? His work require a bit of effort and cultivation ... so does an incredible amount of art. Emotional communication does not at all exclude effort or cultivation; in fact, you can 'hear' a lot more if you sharpen your perception.
Cultivation seems hard to distinguish from any learning. Who is uncultivated, a four year old? Is art only what a four year old understands? That greatly limits what it can communicate to people who have become cultivated beyond that.
My interpretation of what he intended more closely aligns with the word "pretentious". Artistic contributions that are veiled behind complexity and technique, or require explanation and close examination, and exposure. I can't speak to the native Russian texts, but the English translations of his work, I would surmise, could be understood by anyone. In the preface to the copy of What is Art? that I read, it was reported that Tolstoy struggled with the topic for some time, and that he struggled to adhere to the principals he laid that define art. But again, I'm butchering it, and suggest you read it for yourself.
The peasant work song is art, Wagner's leitmotifs are pretentious.
I've never seen Tolstoy's attempt at a such definition before, but from what you describe, it reminds me of what Joyce had Stephen Daedalus think about art (I wonder if it was informed at all by Tolstoy).
As I recall it, the idea is that art starts with an unmitigated cry which is then made abstract, universal, in some way. I see no way for this to occur without some technical prowess, however.
One can surely be a noble and delight in the way in which the peasants and serfs conduct their culture. But to surmise that their art was artless (i.e. without τέχνη) seems foolish and makes me think there must be more to it than what you've suggested in your comment. Otherwise, were I to throw a fit in the street, that would qualify as art; but were I to do it in hexameter, that would not be art.
I think you are in essence right about what you're arguing, however. No cry comes from a machine, after all.
It's not so much that art had ought to be without prowess, but that the predominating reason for art to exist is as a medium of communication of a message, of emotion, to everyone. Art for art's sake, art designed only to convey the technical abilities of an artist isn't art because it isn't communicating the frame of reference of an artist, it's showing their ability to cleanly transition from dark to light values. It isn't intended to convey the mournful sadness and doesn't impute the viewer with the sense of voyeurism a la Repin's Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 but as I qualified in the parent, I'm doing the text an injustice, it's a great work.
One definition is that a poem is a mechanism for communicating a feeling from inside one human's mind into another's.
In which case no AI-generated poem (prior to actual GAI) can properly be called a poem, since it isn't generated out of a feeling.
On the other hand:
If a human, who is feeling something, but is unable to summon the words to express that feeling, prompts an ML program to help them generate some words that they think communicate that feeling - then shares that with an audience and successfully communicate that way...
I was hanging out with a girl who worked to verify the authenticity of social media profiles. She saw a number of computer generated profiles. One that stuck with her had a line, “Every year I look for a raise, but it never comes.”
Since it’s computer generated, it’s not a story about someone’s experience. It’s not a communique from one human to another. I thought it was like tap dancing on the keyboard of the human mind, and when the computer lands an evocative line, which we thought this was, it has something to say about ourselves.
My hope with computer generated poetry is that we might be able to use it know ourselves better.
That’s a very good point. If a computer program can generate words that make you feel something, does it even matter that there was no intent behind the program that selected those words?
A landscape can be breathtakingly beautiful. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t created specifically to invoke that feeling - just that the forces of nature conspired to create something so exquisite is enough.
Maybe the same goes for computerized creativity. Pieces of beauty found among the landscape of possible things it can emit are like natural wonders, rather than works of art.
> I thought it was like tap dancing on the keyboard of the human mind, and when the computer lands an evocative line, which we thought this was, it has something to say about ourselves.
To me this is no different conceptually as 'seeing' a face in the grill of a car or the front of a building. A sort of mental version of 'Pareidolia'.
The "American poet Andrew Brown" here -- I'm honored, I don't think anyone has ever called me a real poet before!
Looks like the full poem they're referring to is:
> I think I’ll start to rain,
> Because I don’t think I can stand the pain,
> Of seeing you two,
> Fighting like you do.
For the record, the original tweet [1] doesn't mention rhymes, but the replies [2] do: I say generations that actually rhyme are "pretty rare" and that only half of poems generated with the prompt I was sharing were even worth editing into something good.
Of course, that part doesn't get quoted in articles like this...
Have you heard of anyone attempting a transformer better specialized for poetry? ISTM that GPT3's tokenization isn't ideal as makes it needlessly complex to model how words sound.
Maybe reducing the vocabulary to simple english so every word is a single token and using some embedding that was trained using word sounds, or something along those lines?
I talked with one or two people were interested in further poetry work but I haven't heard of anything since. The most interesting recent news is someone claiming that InstructGPT can be prompted to do what looks like genuine rhyming, but they didn't share their prompt and I've been too busy to followup.
The vocab tokenizing already mostly works, as you can see from the results. I think the solution really is as simple as switching to a byte encoding like ByT5, and perhaps someone spending 30 minutes to run a few megabytes of text through an IPA phonetic encoder to enrich the training corpus. Rhyming is just not that hard or complex compared to the things neural nets already do. It's purely artifactual. Then one can focus on more interesting and challenging tasks, like curating high-quality corpuses for finetuning.
Yeah, the challenge there is both understanding the word sounds and enough of the world to say something clever.
It shouldn't just help with rhyming, puns that depend on understanding how words sound. One of these models could easily be vastly super human at cross-language puns if they only understood the sound of words. :P
I agree. I think a lot of this falls to how poetry is taught in schools.
There's a bunch of emphasis on the basic mechanics, but there is almost no insight at all into what makes a poem compelling.
Take, for instance, the humble haiku. I was taught it was three lines with a set number of syllables. No insight into there Japanese language, the meaning behind recurring themes, or even it's origins in collaborative poetry called renku.
You can draw a line from haiku, to wood block prints, to dada and surrealism, to beatnicks and the Beatles.
Western / English poetry is treated even worse. Lessons usually boil down to "write out words so that some rhyme in the right places".
There are some fantastic English poets throughout history and today, buried in a sea of unfortunate imitations.
Despite the headine, the article is actually pretty sceptical about the quality of current machine-generated poetry, aside from some fluff about the "inevitability" of AI being able to write human-quality poetry. There's nowhere in the article that I could see which claims that "many people can't tell the difference." (Headlines are often written by editors rather than the writers themselves, and this one seems to have generated a particularly big disconnection between the two - I think the write has been hard done by here).
Besides which, often with these claims if you dig into them they start to fall apart. There's one about wine tasting that's often circulated - a study where people "couldn't tell the difference between red wine and white wine with added red food colouring". But IIRC the people in the study were first-year oenology (the study of wine) students, and I bet you (a) they'd be able to tell the difference between a Malbec and a Pouilly Fumé with red food colouring and (b) people who'd been tasting wine for longer (i.e. people who had more experience) would be able to tell the difference.
I'm reminded of a radio comedy panel game where the punchline to a joke was "bite the wax tadpole", and there was quite a bit of laughter around the fact that it was probably the first time in human civilisation that those four words had been used in that order before. AI may eventually be able to write something reasonable, but there's something very specific about good poetry ("good" is of course subjective) that I think is likely to always set it apart.
> people who'd been tasting wine for longer (i.e. people who had more experience) would be able to tell the difference.
I’m not so sure of this. Netflix had a fantastic documentary called “Som” that followed a group of people who were about to take the Master Sommelier exam (roughly fifty total in the whole world) and even these extremely experienced people would get even basic things like the varietal completely wrong quite frequently.
These things that involve some people being labelled distinguished, or of distinguished taste, is not actually those people being distinguished but just a branding that marks them as such and then them being accepted as such by people who are willing to just accept that blindingly and spend money around that experience and arrangement and then talk to each other about such mostly fake enterprise usually with multiple “you know.. you know” in a sentence. It’s just a market producing something that they convinced its target consumers that they need it, they’d enjoy it; and the consumers believe it.
I believe I saw this specific charade from very close when I had the opportunity to taste fantastic 4-5-6 Euro wine bottles in Europe. “Oh, so woody”, “smoky”, “that’s peach, isn’t it?”, “No? Pineapple? Yes yes yes. I thought so. Of course, of course”, “Exquisite”, “I can almost taste the earth”, “You know it makes you hear the rain drops as it goes past your tongue”.
But in matters of taste, and specifically of wine-tasting, claims of 'expertise' have repeatedly been proven dubious. Run a search and you'll see why. There's a scam around that industry.
> But in matters of taste, and specifically of wine-tasting, claims of 'expertise' have repeatedly been proven dubious.
I don't know about wine tasting but I've seen many claims that, in fields where objective data is limited, there is no knowledge, no quality, etc.; that reality is some extreme of relativism where everything is arbitrary preference. (What a depresssing, flat nihilism that results in!) For example, it's often applied to the arts and to things challenging, 'highbrow' - things that tend to make people feel intimidated or inferior.
The argument amounts to, 'if I can't measure it, it doesn't exist', and I think that is dubious. It's dubious not only on its face, but because most of what humans do requires subjective judgment; very little depends mostly on objective information. Finally, in fields where I've gained expertise (or more sophisticated perception), I've come to see that I had been missing out previously.
I've seen those claims many times - and people often believe what is repeated, regardless of evidence - but not proven.
I am specifically claiming that I am not so sure an expert would be able to tell the difference in that experiment, given the video evidence that I’ve seen that shows that even the best in the world cannot always determine even basic aspects like the varietal in a blind tasting.
Between this and DALL-E 2, I’ve been ruminating on David Hilbert’s old quip about a student: “For a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination. But now he is a poet, and everything is fine.”
As someone with experience in both STEM and the arts, I don’t feel particularly bad about saying that some “creative” pursuits are more creative than others, and my rough thesis is that the ones on the higher end of the scale are the ones that will take longer to fall to AI.
Representational painting is, at the end of the day, a somewhat mechanical problem, so it’s not too surprising that AI is rapidly catching up to humans there. “Draw me a cat eating ice cream on the beach” is a fairly well-defined request with a clear range of acceptable solutions.
I think the creativity exhibited in a long-form written work like say, Plato’s “Republic”, is of a much higher degree than your average painting or short poem. Not only is it an aesthetically beautiful work, but it contains a great deal of novel (for its time) intellectual content as well, filtered through the personal perspective of the author, and organized in an elaborate logical structure. When it comes to these types of large-scale creative works, AI hasn’t even begun to tackle the problem yet.
So its "intention" that is hard to replicate by machines, huh. How far is the day when the first machine decide to make something truly for its own sake?
Well, no, I wouldn’t say that my post was about “intention”. I could imagine, in principle, someone saying “hey GPT-3, write me a philosophical masterpiece” or “write me a hit novel” and it does. No intentionality required. It’s just that in actuality, it can’t do that yet.
In one example, American poet Andrew Brown asked the software to take the perspective of a cloud gazing down on two warring cities. GPT-3 delivered a rhyming poem that began, not uncharmingly, with “I think I’ll start to rain.” Stephen Marche, writing an article for The New Yorker, assigned GPT-3 maybe the trippiest poem in the English canon: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fifty-four-line “Kubla Khan”—an opium dream interrupted in the middle of its composition in 1797 and never completed. GPT-3’s mission? Finish the fragment. What the program fantasized was so sophisticated (“The tumult ceased, the clouds were torn, / The moon resumed her solemn course”) that readers unfamiliar with the original poem might have had a hard time discerning where Coleridge ended and the computer began.
This is not robots writing poetry. This is poets using computers.
I wonder if humans are so primed to find meaning in poetry that a lot of people would find something in anything.
For example, take Bob Dylan and have him write 7 random words (for example using the Diceware password generator.) Then release this 7 words saying that this is a leak of one of the lines in an unpublished song.
I bet that you will get entire articles analyzing those 7 words in great detail and coming to the conclusion that that line is one of the most profound lines ever written.
Or take "I am the Walrus" a mix of dream scenes and childhood nonsense rhymes scrambled[1] together as a riposte to taking Beatles and Dylan lyrics too seriously, and see people analysing it as using the Inuit symbol of death to say something about Paul...
[1]I wasn't consciously thinking of the egg man when I picked this word...
There was an art movement called dadaism in the 20th century where poets would cut up a newspaper and randomly rearrange a selection of letters, syllables and words into verse. People where flabbergasted as to how such a random process could produce such profound statements. Language already encodes meaning and our brains are wired to read into it. I always think of this when I read how amazing language models.
I teach computational approaches to literature at a university, and I always give my students a test to see if they can tell which poems were written by a computer, and which were written by a human. They tend to score about 50%. But to me, a literary scholar, I know immediately, from a glance even, which ones aren't written by humans, because they're patently ridiculous. I guess if you're not really a reader of poetry, or don't understand it, it's all just nonsense anyway. But for the rest of us, not even the most advanced language models can pull off a poem, convincingly.
A lot of it probably is, the problem with classical art, or say surrealism, is all the trash has been forgotten, and the only thing that is remembered is the good stuff. With modern (contemporary) art we have to wait for the winnowing to occur.
Same with poetry, people do read and write poetry still, I've always loved Dylan Thomas. I feel his poetry is, perhaps, very approachable for techies:
I think human average is below top AI on a large number of tasks already. We don't actually know how many because the latest generation of models adapt so easily, it's a matter of asking (finding the right prompt).
For example GPT-3 writing articles on demand - hard to tell which is real and which is fake. Translation works very well, and no human could cover the same number of language pairs. And not just translation, but also voice recognition and speech synthesis. Models also do well in symbolic math and can generate code at average human level in competitive programming.
Short poetry is possible, music composition is possible. I think the average humans can write worse poetry and music. Driving cars? Controversial, but AI may be better than the average humans. DALL-E 2 is a better illustrator than the average human. Even protein folding is better with AI than we could do with any other method. Games - it's hard to find games where the top human still beats the top AI.
The idea is that we're passing a threshold moment now. Especially GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 and family, they have a radical new kind of generality. It wasn't like this before 2020. Now it's 100x easier to get an AI to do a task, no need to label much data, just tell it what you want and give a couple of examples, like you would do with a human. It's gonna be interesting to see the effects ripple in all the fields in the next 5-10 years.
Many discussions turn to political and inferiority issues, essentially, 'is this development a signal that machines are surpassing us?' But let's leave that aside and look at it as art:
Many artists have used randomness; you could look at this software as a sort of controlled randomness. More interesting to me, artists also have created works challenging the source and significance of meaning, teasing that line between meaning and nothingness. There are so many possibilities with this tool.
Also, it could be a sort of Rorschach Test, even adding a feedback loop.
Why do we neglect poetry, anyway? After Mother Goose there's a great lacuna in poetic education up until, I suppose, a possible Literature degree. In school we study and restudy novels and Shakespeare-as-a-novel, which (despite the method of teaching) sets up students to enjoy novels. But we study poetry not at all, or only rarely. (Let alone long-form poetry!) And certainly there's a market for poetry: after all, rap is poetry, and the best examples of rap are up there with the greats.
I need to amend my previous question, actually. Both poetry and prose have fairly popular public outlets in the form of the novel and rap. (Of course rap is a specific form of poetry, but the popular novel tends to take a stereotyped form as well: the romance, the detective story, formerly the pulp adventure...) The best examples of popular novels and rap ascend to the status of high art (really the best type of high art, the high art that is also low art.) But, crucially, a novel reader whose interest is piqued by very good popular novels can fairly seamlessly transition into reading literary fiction, as it shares in large part the form and characteristics of the novel. The rap listener awed by, e.g. Kendrick Lamar's lyricism, has no such path to literary poetry. How do we expect poetry to thrive in these conditions?
And that's not even getting into the historical conditions which mean many people dismiss rap music.
That's really interesting. In Germany poetry is handled differently. In the earlier years of what would be high-school there are poets like Jandel[0] and Morgenstern[1] in the curriculum who wrote a lot of funny, nonsensical poems playing with language a lot.
Later (if you do schooling aimed at getting you to university) there is a lot of in-depth reading of romantic[2]as well as clacissist (think the latet works of Goethe and Schiller) poetry. Also, at least in my Latin classes, we also read Ovid, as well as Shakespeare's sonnets.
These poems are analysed regarding their contents, as well as more formally concerning meter etc.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Jandl
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Morgenstern
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
I'm of two minds about the gymnasium system. On the one hand, as you say, it seems to provide a better, more well-rounded education than the public school system of at least my native Australia. But on the other hand, I am constitutionally incapable of endorsing any kind of streamed education system, despite (or in actual fact because of) having attended a highly selective school myself. My gut reaction, in all my idealism, is that the quality and level of education of a selective school should be available for everyone. Of course there are myriad obstacles, etc. etc. (I won't dwell on them because it depresses me.)
But surely public education can be a whole lot better even for the broad masses of the population: e.g. apparently the Soviet maths curriculum (for which the textbooks are freely available online, interesting to look at) was highly advanced when compared to the e.g. Australian one (which is more advanced than the American one), and yet the two systems had similar rates of attainment within each curriculum. More personally, it's astonishing to me the rates at which even highly educated Americans speak of calculus only in hushed and awed voices as if it's some kind of arcane art, and equally it was astonishing to me during high school to see that my friends (who, not to brag, I do not believe are significantly more intelligent than me) were so incredibly advanced in mathematics compared to me, simply because of their private tuition.
To get back on topic, how is the status of poetry in German culture? Is it more mainstream, do you think, than in English-speaking culture? More popular?
(And finally, to add another parenthetical to an already bloated and unedited post, I may as well qualify my assertions in my original comment: Poetry is not completely absent during high school education. I remember there was one 4-weekish unit on slam poetry, though to my recollection it consisted mostly of memorising a litany of 'poetic techniques'. [Also, to be fair, the predominant method in teaching prose.] And of course there is, which should perhaps not really count, the perennial acrostic - which I suspect was the only form of poetry they thought children could write.)
I don't have a similarly elegant answer to your query, but it made me pause and consider why I dislike poetry and in lesser way, rap music.
I dislike poetry (and rap) because it is too introspective, too personal, too self centred and painting a picture of the author's mindset that is lost on someone else. Other art forms try to elicit an emotion to the readers or viewers. They're telling a story, presenting an idea for someone else's eyes. Feels to me like no one can appreciate the poet's art and depth more than its author. As such, there is no bad poetry, which is why it's that easy to have robots convince us that random words are instead contents of a particularly troubled mind.
I can't help but feel this kind of thing is going to hurt AI.
Poetry seems perfectly placed in the zone of "something that feels like a high-level human achievent" mixed with "most people have no clue about what this involves".
It's like chess all over again.
Smart people can play chess well. A machine that can play chess well is smart. No, this is a stupid conclusion that never held up to any scrutiny even in the decades before we had real functioning chess computers to base our intuitions on.
There's another story on HN about AI doing IQ tests, the stupidity of which makes me angry.
Mechanical calculators can outdo human beings at specific tasks just as car jack can lift more than a human. This doesn't make them "strong" or "smart", they're just tools.
Cool, useful (sometimes) tools. Pretending they are magical beings doesn't really seem to help in any way, it doesn't even seem to be desirable if it was true which it obviously isn't so why do we keep doing it?
Poems and aphorisms are an art form that requires the reader to fill gaps in logical structure to create meaning. Humans naturally try to generate meaning from arbitrary nonsense if it's grammatically correct.
Human curated samples will almost certainly be good.
COWS FLY LIKE CLOUDS BUT THEY ARE NEVER COMPLETELY SUCCESSFUL.
TIME. TIME. WHAT IS TIME? SWISS MANUFACTURE IT. FRENCH HORDE
IT. ITALIANS WANT IT, HUH? WELL, I MUST BE THURSDAY. I NEVER
COULD GET THE HANG OF THURSDAYS.
I COULD SHAKE MY TINY FIST AND SWEAR I WASN'T WRONG, BUT WHAT'S THE SENSE
IN ARGUING WHEN YOU'RE MUCH TOO BUSY RETURNING TO THE LAVATOR.
> There is no question that poetry will be subsumed, and soon, into the ideology of data collection, existing on the same spectrum as footstep counters, high-frequency stock trading, and Netflix recommendations. Maybe this is how the so-called singularity—the moment machines exceed humans and, in turn, refashion us—comes about.
This reminds me of in the mid to late oughts in biology we had similar futurists telling us the scientific discipline of taxonomy would be rendered obsolete by advances in DNA barcoding. It seems naive in hindsight. Genetic techniques are now established as a tool to aid taxonomy, but one among many.
I wonder if those in literature would feel the same about this.
It seems no one has stopped to consider that some people just like poetry, whether it is from an "authenticated" human source, or AI and is close enough to language to engage the brain in a variety of ways. Does it matter?
AI art is just its own subset of conceptual interest in the area of generative/computational aesthetics. It won't take over / it's not some kind of paradigm shift for the art world because it doesn't fundamentally challenge what's important about complex interpersonal emotional communication in any new way just by mimicking it. Sol LeWitt has already separated agency one more degree by writing instruction sets for others to perform the artworks for the better part of the past century.
Poetry being the supremely subjective thing it is, quite possible that a "good" poem written by a robot is "better" than many written by humans - which would actually be a good thing - who is to judge? Atleast we won't be accusing robots of stealing "good paying jobs" of poets anytime soon.
And most people couldn't tell the difference between a genuine paper on quantum mechanics and one generated by a machine. Would that mean machines could write genuine papers on quantum mechanics? This article says more about most people's ignorance of poetry than anything else.
To be fairer, poetry like many other arts is highly subjective. The difference between a good poem and a bad one may have more to do with comparisons between other works at a given point in time than it does with any sort of "ideal poem".
Same thing going on with dalle-2. Hell, even formal mathematics has trouble justifying "why" a particular problem is worth solving.
I think people take into account the author, their sincerity, their experience, and how those words personally make the reader feel. This is the same reason I love Radiohead but would probably hate a Radiohead knockoff made by some AI. It's more about the people in the band and whether or not I relate with their message than it is about whether or not they are objectively good to listen to (they aren't, many people hate that band).
Being highly subjective doesn't make its study less worthwhile in the slightest and study of subjective topics can still possess rigour and commonly held opinions derived from first principles (i.e. "taste"). Look no further than the study of art, music and literature and philosophy to see just how much humans enjoy deep dives into arbitrary rules. It's maybe even part of what makes us human.
I would guess that an AI's ability to write poetry passable as human-authored is inversely correlated with length. So good haikus - certainly; Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard - never (before AGI).
I'm not sure about good short poems. A short poem is so condensed, that it allows the reader to project his own meaning into the text, even when there was no meaning to begin with (which, arguably, is the case with all current AI generated poetry).
I think a short AI generated poem can be perceived as good, because of this. I still hope that I would not be tricked by it myself.
I always found it funny how AI researchers are desperately trying to create consciousness so their machines will finally pass as human. All the while the key to being human lies in the unconscious.
OP argues that GPT-3's poems 'fall dead' and never become 'a memorable unity'. I will just say that for me, a number of GPT-3's poems like "Uber-Poem" (https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#uber-poem) or "The Universe Is A Glitch" (https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#the-universe-is-a-glitch) struck me as a good deal more lively and memorable than the vast majority of the poems I puzzle through reading the New Yorker or Paris Review.