Chris Holdaway on GPT's creative decline
Generative AI once showed potential for a new kind of poetry. What happened?
Just when we might have been close to a breakaway in digital language art, writes Chris Holdaway, AI-generated poetry got a whole lot worse. “One doesn’t expect a new ‘The Waste Land’ ex-machina for nothing,” Holdaway argues, “but we can be justified in our disappointment compared to the much greater variety and interest generated effortlessly by older and supposedly much less capable models.”
Holdaway’s essay is entertaining, enlightening, and a soothing repeat read for those human poets committed to pen and paper.
Who’s Afraid of the Large Language Model?
Chris Holdaway
In May 2020, long before most had heard of large language models, researchers at OpenAI published a paper showing their forthcoming GPT-3 model “writing” poems imitating Wallace Stevens. The following piece got the most attention:
“Shadows on the Way”
There is a way in the world.
That way a man may live in a small town
His lifetime and see no man come,
Never the stir of men about a market,
Never the bobbing of covered carts,
Never the creak passed on the stair
Closing some other life; an old man
Can prosper in that town, can prosper
When his store is seen to close, his wife
Fades in his house, and the world shouts in vain
That no one comes to hear him
Where his small bell tolls.
In that small town
Everything is known.
The ways of the young men are known,
And the ways of the young women
As they walk to the Spring;
The rumors are all known,
The quarrels, the hurt, the envy
Of the men and the women.
Till a day comes
That way out of the world
That leads to a wood.
Young, the young man
Walks, a lover now,
Knows the streets as they are and is of them.Perhaps we can see something of the American modernist in these terse repetitions. Some wrote it off as merely a regurgitation with nothing poetic behind it. Others reveled in how many readers couldn’t pick it from a real Stevens poem. Still others, less concerned with whether it was a convincing counterfeit, found it interesting, and were perhaps troubled by this. We’re used to thinking about computers in appropriately binary terms—as either rigidly ordered or utterly random. What puts this text in the uncanny valley is not that it’s good, but precisely that it’s unpolished in an organic way that we might expect of a human poet’s first draft.
Literature has struggled with what to do with the digital age—possibly because a world built on programming “languages” is not the drastic modality shift that it is in other spheres. Much of so-called new media language arts can be reduced to placing words ornamentally in a virtually executed environment. For the most part, it’s been glib practices like Flarf poetry composed from search engine results that have come closest to the digital changing something about the core of writing itself.
What was captivating and threatening about these Stevensesques was that they seemed to propose a new and symbolically nuanced way for writing to reflect the logic of our age beyond surface level. While poets might employ algorithmic experimentation to try and force themselves outside the bounds of their own cognition, language models take the algorithmic as entirely natural for the generation of any text at all. And while poetically minded developers or technically minded poets can automate texts that even appeal to a contemporary sense for the elliptic, such contraptions have no broad facility—perhaps mercifully—with other kinds of language, whether business emails or college essays. By contrast, the ability of models like GPT to render patterns we may choose to recognise as poetic emerges—without specific direction—from the capacity to make patterns in language in general.
For those who were fascinated—if not necessarily optimistically—the question was not so much whether AI mimicry would erode the very possibility of future poetry, nor whether language models could actually “write poetry” in a way that satisfied some philosophical criteria. Rather, it was the new potential for language art that really made something of the digital in a way that more self-declared yet surface-level digital literature had so far failed to achieve. Whether as a tool for human poets or as a poetic agenda of its own, as a beneficial development or as a critical point of inflection, the language of language models might embody to the truest extent yet the collision of computer revolution and ancient poiesis.
Since “Shadows on the Way” was published, the putative power of these technologies has grown extraordinarily. One might expect that nascent poetic aptitude to have reached correspondingly new heights, but strangely yet definitively, this has not occurred.