Will ChatGPT eliminate poets?
——Gu Lirong's testimonials after trying to ask ChatGPT to write a poem
Since its official launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly attracted much attention and become popular all over the world. This artificial intelligence chatbot program developed by the "Open Artificial Intelligence Research Center" (OpenAI) in the United States can communicate dialogue, give answers and generate text through its AI language model.
ChatGPT can write and debug computer programs, can give detailed and clear answers to many areas of knowledge, can help students write term papers, work resumes, can write business plans, and can do a variety of creations, including scripts, songs, novels, poems, and so on.
Because I wrote my own poems, I was particularly interested in ChatGPT's ability to create new poems, so I spent some time examining ChatGPT's ability to compare several widely circulated modern poems with reference to several poetry creation factors.
One. The personalization of poetry
There is a poem "Homesickness" by the poet Yu Guang, expressing his feelings of reluctance for his hometown, and I want to refer to his poem to watch the performance of ChatGPT.
I have to admit that the poems created by ChatGPT in a few seconds are quite surprising, not to mention that there are no typos, its paragraphs are clear, the tone is smooth, the content is progressive, always around the theme, close to the theme, and finally there is some feeling of echoing from beginning to end.
But it seriously lacks personality!
Belinsky had a saying, "The deeper and more powerful the poet's personality, the more he is a poet." Poetry is the product of the poet's individual experiences and feelings combined with the accumulation of language. A different poet, a different perspective, a different world, the good poems created usually correspond to a unique language style, distinct personality characteristics, so that people can be impressed.
Yu Guangzhong wrote "Homesickness", which is also four stanzas, advancing along with the change of time, from childhood to adulthood, to later, to now, in this time dimension he refined the expression of nostalgia concerns that represent the individuality of the spatial dimension, when he was a child, it was a small stamp, when he grew up it was a narrow ticket, then a low grave, and now a shallow strait. The verse continues to render, and the objects that are blocked from the mother, to the bride, to the mother, and finally to the continent on the other side, summarizing the unique nostalgic imprint of the poet's life. In contrast, such poems are more flesh and blood than the general poems created by ChatGPT without personal experience content, and are more likely to resonate and touch people's hearts.
Two. The scenes of poetry blend
Situational relationship is a very important poetic category in poetry theory, some poems originate from the scene, the so-called touch of the scene generates love, and some poems integrate into the scene, placing feelings in the scene; Either way, to borrow Wang Guowei's words in "Human Words": "In the past, when people talked about poetry, there was a difference between scenery and love words, and I didn't know that all scenery was love language", scenery is the appearance, love is the connotation, only by blending scenes, poetry can achieve unique and outstanding imagery and level.
I chose Xu Zhimo's poem "Farewell to Kangqiao" to watch the performance of ChatGPT compared to ChatGPT.
At first, I just gave the theme, and ChatGPT wrote a poem that is not wrong anywhere, not bad, but certainly not good:
So I suggested the scene of the farewell place, there was a river, there were willows, and I wanted to add these contents to the poem.
ChatGPT "cheerfully" accepted my request, and within a minute, sent another poem expanded to five paragraphs:
You can see that ChatGPT is smart enough to add river and willow, and uses the appropriate modifiers to become a long river, a gentle willow, and accurately attaches the other properties of these two elements, the sound of the waves of the river, the breeze between the willows.
So this is a poem that cannot be faulted, but it is obviously a mediocre and dull poem, the scenery and emotions are on their own, do not blend with each other, and appear cold and boring.
In contrast, Xu Zhimo's "Farewell to Kangqiao", the first sentence takes people into the place, "Gently I go, just as I come gently, I gently beckon, as a cloud in the western sky." With the word "gently" three times in a row, the filaments are wrapped around, and the scenery clouds also have life, becoming representatives that can be used for parting dialogue.
And the golden willow on the banks of the Kangqiao River is transformed into a bride in the sunset in the eyes of the poet; The vivid shadows in the sparkling light ripple in the heart.
When the poet falls in love with his alma mater, which is about to leave, every grass and tree there becomes touching; Seeing the soft waves of the Kang River, he willingly made a water grass to immerse in it, saw a clear spring under the shade of the locust, he imagined that this was a rainbow in the sky, and imagined the rainbow-like dream that had been crumpled here and precipitated among the floating algae.
Reading along the verse, you can feel the poet's gaze lingering on the scene and object of Kangqiao, and every time you stop, it is a love reluctance, an imaginary embrace and union, this love is dissolved in the scene, this scene is in love, the scene blends, and the intertwined brilliance. Time passes, and only such poems can be handed down.
Three. Parables in poetry
Zhu Xi said in the "Collection of Poems" that metaphor is "using this object as a metaphor for another object", and poetry is perhaps the most widely used artistic creation of this term.
There are many kinds of metaphors, usually divided into similes, metaphors, metaphors and metaphors, and whether successful metaphors can be established in poetry depends on the imagination and creativity of the poet. Good metaphors can help make connections between related elements, can make poems read smart and even peculiar, and make people feel fresh.
I wrote a little poem last year titled "White Moonlight," and I decided to use it to compete with ChatGPT, and then use it to test ChatGPT's ability to write reviews.
As you can see from the above, ChatGPT is well aware of the physical properties of white moonlight, and probably knows the positive characteristics it represents, so I tried to let ChatGPT use a metaphor and play it further:
ChatGPT was obedient and immediately used a metaphor in the first sentence of the newly composed poem, strictly speaking, a simile, and only once, it felt very blunt.
I asked further about its definition of metaphor. It "does not hesitate" to give answers in the blink of an eye, highlighting the great use of ChatGPT as a learning aid, accurate and detailed answers.
Subsequent conversations showed that ChatGPT's ability to learn quickly in real time is getting smarter:
When I tested it again, and when I saw its output, I knew that it tried its best, and I gave up, and I definitely don't want to take this poem as a treasure anyway:
Four. Poetry Review
After reading many articles praising ChatGPT's ability to analyze logic, I turned to its performance in commenting on poetry:
ChatGPT is both confident and modest, well, try the White Moonlight I wrote:
This time ChatGPT was a little impressed by me, and I couldn't figure out if it was my previous series of conversations that used white moonlight as a metaphor, which organically added its calculation formula and then generated this comment.
There are several "self-righteous" mistakes in this comment, such as saying "people are on the go...", which would be okay if it became "people are on the journey of life..."
But I clearly see the potential to use ChatGPT's powerful logical calculations and learning abilities to draft a first draft of a review article, and on that basis, or further input text for it to correct, play, or human critic editing and editing, it is possible to hastily transfer a term paper and so on.
Five. About poetry, about the direction of development of new poetry
I had a conversation with ChatGPT about poetry, about the direction of new poetry, and I admired its depth of knowledge, good attitude to correct mistakes (if robots also have attitude scores), and its direction choice after accumulating human knowledge:
Conclusion: Returning to the fundamental question of this article, can ChatGPT eliminate poets, I think its own answer is already very good:
I believe that in the near future, ChatGPT will eliminate a lot of work, but it will not eliminate poets, it will not block people's willingness to write poetry; It cannot eliminate the poetry of countless loves and countless heartbeats, countless disillusionments, countless hopes to flicker and illuminate in this huge space of heaven and earth in this world.
Many people will lose their jobs because of ChatGPT, but poets will not, because poets are not a profession in the first place, they will always be sentimental human beings hijacked by language captive to feelings, and they will always be engaged in this eternal and beautiful cause.
Gu Lirong in Maryland, USA, February 9, 2023
About author:Gu Lirong, who has studied at Tsinghua University for ten years since 1981, served as the president of the literary club during the school, and later served as a columnist for the magazine "Mizuki Tsinghua" of the Tsinghua University Alumni Association. His prose poems have been published in many media at home and abroad, and he is the author of the poetry collections "Goodbye to the Rainy Season", "Rose in Early Summer", and the prose collection "The Tree of Life".
Source: Guangming Daily Expo