Language models can only write poetry

Maybe the creative work is now to figure out ways to nudge AIs into being weird and interesting rather than producing inane imitations of the most ordinary human writing

I think that the language model’s failure to dismiss the class results from a slightly different cause than my student’s failure to dismiss the class with the same utterance. While the student’s failure arises from their lack of authority, the model’s failure results from the fact that it functions more like a  citation  of language rathe

A poem, I would say, is the site where “hollow and void” poetry is tactically deployed in a physical and social context, in order to achieve a particular effect. The poem unites poetry with an intention. So yes, a language model can indeed (and can only) write poetry, but only a person can write a poem.

Now none of this is meant to say that I think programmers, artists and engineers have no responsibilities when it comes to the outputs of machine learning models. In fact, I think we bear responsibility for everything these models do. (I never, for example, attribute authorship to a program or a model. If I publish the results of a text generator,