A writer mopes, perplexed.
The computers then take over.
Blink! The task has been completed.
A person wrote this haiku, a classic Japanese poetry of five syllables followed by seven, then five again (me). But what if it’s not? The gap between what’s artistically feasible for people (with free-thinking brains that expand and morph eternally) and what’s conceivable for computers (which once only understood what was programmed by human hands) is closing at breakneck pace in the twenty-first century. A research out of Kyoto, Japan, has brought this convergence into sharp focus by comparing the artistry of haikus created by great poets to those penned by artificial intelligence and found no difference in perception.
However, it discovered that people are prone to dismissing AI-generated art, a phenomenon known as “algorithm aversion.”
People judged haikus for their beauty and humor in the research, ignorant of whether they were authored by humans or created by a machine. (Of course, their ignorance was planned.) In all, 385 participants analyzed 80 poems, half of which were created by professional poets and the other half by AI. Half of the 40 AI-generated poems were independent of human involvement (named “human out of the loop”), while the other half required supervision from humans with the ability to alter algorithms in a feedback system (called “human in the loop”).
As it turned out, most people were unable to perceive the enchantment of human contact. The poems produced entirely by humans scored similarly to those generated entirely by algorithms. Notably, the crops of poems that received the most praise for their beauty were produced by AIs and humans working together, with readers calling the haikus “inspiring,” “aesthetic,” and “fascinating.” According to Ueda, if humans collaborate with AI, using it to take art to new realms, this could mean a Renaissance of blossoming creativity.
But that fantasy is met with a brutal reality.
Computers are highly admired for their meticulous calculations—their human-crushing proficiency at crunching statistics and raw data, assessing millions, if not billions, of potential possibilities in the blink of an eye—that have propelled them to the forefronts of subjects such as physics and mathematics. In the high field of creative arts, though, many still argue that algorithms could never reach the visionary heights of the human brain.
Nonetheless, the AIs’ knowledge of the technical components of haikus, as well as their ability to weave a cohesive theme with just a few scant syllables, is impressive. What is possible on the horizon? We’ll find out whether we embrace it.