“Softonic, my dear friend, your name is synonymous with software. Whenever I need something new, I know I can count on you to help me.” It may not be the best poem ever created, but for a poem created by ChatGPT in just fifteen seconds, it could be worse. Right now, poetry without copyright or human hands doesn’t interest us in the slightest. It has no quality, metrics, rhyme… Or knowledge of human feelings. But this has only just begun.
A poem written by ChatGPT
However, ChatGPT 4 is capable of doing more extraordinary things, such as talking about climate change in Shakespearean style, but it still keeps the question hanging over our heads: Is it art? Is a machine capable of creating valid and exciting artistic and creative material? Can an artificial intelligence understand human feelings and make us emotional?
To prove it, we asked ChatGPT 3 to write us a poem about love and spring. “Love blooms like flowers in spring, when the days are longer and the sun shines brighter. Hearts are filled with joy and hope, as nature renews itself with gentle caresses,” she tells us. She wouldn’t win any contests but it’s only fair to point out that the program was born on November 30, 2022 and she has a lot to learn.
If creativity is the unusual, the unique, the never-before-seen, AI-created poetry lags behind because it is very unlikely that they can, at least for now, do anything other than try to replicate the human brain. Or, put another way, “They are sooner made to imitate than to be original. They learn to say the least surprising thing”, as Guillermo Marco and Julio Gonzalo write in El País.
To put it another way: if the result is fun and original, it’s because the basis itself is. If we ask ChatGPT to make us a Becquer-style poem about a man using a fork to poke into a socket, the result will seem original, but it is only because the initial idea is original: as the program is designed to preserve the meaning of the text, the aesthetic extravagances have to come from outside, with the human hand as the orchestra conductor.
If there is no intentionality there can be no art, and artificial intelligence, however useful it may be, is not yet capable of reflecting and understanding human feelings so much that its poems have a motive or a reflection behind them. Oh, and as you had been left wanting: “A curious man, eager to know, approached the socket with a fork in his possession. But danger lurked there, and his curiosity was going to cost him.” Pure poetry for a day like today.
