Maria Popova touches on something here that I have noticed when reading texts largely generated by artificial intelligence. They seem empty. Yes, there are words in a sequence that conform to the rules of grammar, but they usually are so formulaic as to lack much meaning.
Popova’s experiment was to prompt ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. “It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me,” she found.
This result is a bit puzzling, considering the vast quantity of source material the large language model has to draw on. But still Whitman could do what the AI could not–“conjure up cosmoses of feeling with a single line…sculpt from the commonest words an image so dazzlingly original it stops you up short, spins you around, leaves the path of your thought transformed.”
Perhaps what it takes to create great art that can speak to human souls and transform human minds is human experience.
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