Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Primary Elections from LA to Maine, plus AI "Poetry" / Start Making Sense

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Primary Elections from LA to Maine, plus AI "Poetry" / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

0:08
[SPEAKER_01]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
0:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And John Weiner, later in the hour, Kim A.I.
0:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Wright poetry, good poetry.
0:17
[SPEAKER_01]: The nation's award-winning poet, Katha Pollett decided to find out.
0:22
[SPEAKER_01]: That's later in the hour.
0:24
[SPEAKER_01]: But first, Harold Meyerson has today's political news.
0:27
[SPEAKER_01]: That's coming up in a minute.
0:31
[SPEAKER_01]: First up, the Democrats' strengths and the Democrats' divisions, for today's political update, we turn to Harold Meyerson.
0:39
[SPEAKER_01]: He's editor-it-large of the American prospect, Harold, welcome back.
0:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Always good to be, Hager.
0:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I want to start with the political news from L.A.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: The primary for mayor has been finally resolved in combat care and bass came in first with 34% just a third.
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Progressive City Council member Nithia Romain got 29%.
1:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So the two will go into a runoff in November.
1:06
[SPEAKER_01]: In third place, Republican Spencer Pratt supported by Trump 26%, the New York Times described Nithia, as we call her, as a progressive Democrat who has drawn comparisons to Zoran Mamdani.
1:21
[SPEAKER_01]: How would you compare Nithia and Mamdani?
1:24
[SPEAKER_02]: somewhat unfavorably for Nithia.
1:26
[SPEAKER_02]: To begin with, Montami really united the entire New York city left and running against Andrew Cuomo that was not all that hard to do and he also had the most powerful and united DSA local.
1:45
[SPEAKER_02]: behind him, but not just the local, if the local provided almost all of its 10,000 or 12,000 members to walk precincts and work phone banks, Mondami's total core of volunteers was an amazing just over 100,000, which means roughly 90,000 non-members of DSA also worked for him.
2:13
[SPEAKER_02]: the victory of Fira LaGuardia.
2:16
[SPEAKER_02]: In 1933, he sort of united all of this progressive ferment with a rising ethnic group, these stations and South Asians in New York City.
2:29
[SPEAKER_02]: In this year, ramen can't really claim
2:32
[SPEAKER_02]: that kind of a groundswell and that kind of support.
2:37
[SPEAKER_02]: The LA political landscape is somewhat divided.
2:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not clear actually that she is running really that much to the left of Karen Bass, who has almost no nothing in common.
2:52
[SPEAKER_02]: with Andrew Cuomo, Karen Bass, like Nithia Romano merges out of the LA left, uh, long one of the leading advocates in police critics in South Central.
3:03
[SPEAKER_02]: over a decades-long career, having worked as a 20-something on events, the Ramos Brigade, and Huba, a background that is actually more to the left of Nithiramans background.
3:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And Nithia had then sort of compromised on some of the issues that DSA in LA supports voting for increased police funding,
3:27
[SPEAKER_02]: backing away from all the provisions of the mansion tax on a high valued property when it sold so that really I think on issues as was not the case in the mandami Cuomo race there isn't really a hell of a lot of difference.
3:47
[SPEAKER_02]: between bass and roman.
3:48
[SPEAKER_02]: The difference is that bass is a relatively unpopular mayor and roman is still largely a tabula rossa to Los Angeles voters.
3:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I would add one other thing.
4:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The three other DSA endorsed members of the LA City Council have all endorsed Karen Bass.
4:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a significant move on their part.
4:12
[SPEAKER_02]: It is indeed, and it's reflective of what you might call the growing left establishment in our way.
4:22
[SPEAKER_02]: has been feeling and prioritizing in the sense that Nithia, who had also endorsed Karen Bass, just two weeks before she entered the race, it's sense that Nithia is in this particular instance more and shall we say more an opportunist than a the personification of a left-up surge.
4:44
[SPEAKER_01]: We should say something about Spencer Pratt Trump has declared that there's a quote big cheating by the Democrats and his evidence is the vote count what he calls delay.
4:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Some see this as Trump's strategy for the midterms in November to attack the results when his candidates don't come in first and we saw on Meet the Press how he made the case.
5:10
[SPEAKER_01]: He just said the fact that the
5:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Count is slow, is his evidence of cheating.
5:16
[SPEAKER_01]: All I have to do is look.
5:17
[SPEAKER_01]: He told Kirsten Welker when she asked for evidence of cheating.
5:22
[SPEAKER_01]: What's your assessment of the the Spencer Pratt candidacy in Trump's case here?
5:30
[SPEAKER_02]: All of this partly results from the undo hype that Spencer Pratt received while running from mayor.
5:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to make one point very clear.
5:40
[SPEAKER_02]: He's polling a 26%.
5:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you know what percentage Donald Trump won in Los Angeles and the city of Los Angeles when he won the presidential election in 2024?
5:51
[SPEAKER_01]: What percentage did Trump get in LA in 2024?
5:55
[SPEAKER_02]: 26.5 percent, while Kamala Harris got 70.1 percent.
6:02
[SPEAKER_02]: In other words, there was no imaginable way.
6:07
[SPEAKER_02]: That Spencer Pratt was ever going at top maybe a quarter of the vote in Los Angeles.
6:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The percentage of Republicans within the city of Los Angeles is below 25% and when they're added to the Republican leaners in Los Angeles, you more or less get to 25%.
6:25
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's it.
6:26
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what the population of the city politically is composed of.
6:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Trump's complaint is that Spencer Pratt was in second place for a few days, and then as the week went on, he fell into third place.
6:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Trump considers that to be evidence of fraud, cheating, and you're all crooks.
6:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have another way of understanding this?
6:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, California has a system which is, you know, could stand some tinkering with, but a system by which male ballots and most of the ballots cast in California are male ballots, male ballots that are postmarked no later than election day can be counted up to a week after election day, which is, I guess, you know, so long as they're received by a week after election day,
7:16
[SPEAKER_02]: happens to be the day we're recording on Tuesday of the following week, which allows for late counts.
7:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, in this particular election, Democrats were filing their mail in their ballots disproportionately late because they had to vote tactically looking at the last polls in the
7:43
[SPEAKER_02]: if you're looking for sort of a meta culprit here you might just pick the goddamn jungle primary which under this current alignment of the gubernatorial candidates compelled late voting among Democrats, but that is essentially the full explanation of what went on here and anyone who really understands California politics and Los Angeles politics.
8:07
[SPEAKER_02]: looking at the rough figures immediately after the polls closed, could have concluded that the fact that Spencer Pratt was initially running second was, you know, no way, a guarantee that he'd end up finishing second, quite the contrary.
8:24
[SPEAKER_01]: The biggest and best poll in California before the election conducted by UC Berkeley found that 55% of California Republicans say they are not confident in the results.
8:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So Trump does have an effect on how Republicans in California understand what's going on.
8:46
[SPEAKER_02]: That's because they haven't looked at photo registration figures.
8:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Republicans in California have been following beneath the Democrats, about 40% of the registered voters in California Democrats, about a high 20% or independence, low 20% or Republicans.
9:06
[SPEAKER_02]: They're, you know, if they've had a rational camp, you know, complaint, it would be that they're living in the wrong state.
9:13
[SPEAKER_02]: They are a marginal political group within California, but has so estranged the huge number of immigrants who came into the state beginning in the 1980s.
9:27
[SPEAKER_02]: and continued with such unpopular positions as a position to abortion rights and so on, that they understandably fell to a marginal minority.
9:38
[SPEAKER_02]: That's who they are, and it's not because the way the elections are structured.
9:42
[SPEAKER_02]: It's because they have been brilliant at self-marginalization.
9:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I've one more quote from the New York Times about the mayoral election in LA.
9:54
[SPEAKER_01]: They described Karen Bass as quote, a grandmother and a former physician assistant close quote.
10:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you've pointed out there are some other things in her resume starting with the Vince Aramos Brigade, including chair of the Congressional Black Caucus,
10:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Speaker of the California Assembly, and before all that leader of community coalition in South Central, she's a community organizer.
10:20
[SPEAKER_02]: She's been Speaker of the California State Assembly.
10:23
[SPEAKER_02]: She's head of the Congressional Black Caucus.
10:25
[SPEAKER_02]: She was summoned Joe Biden considered for the vice presidency in 2020 and so on.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's a rather dismissive New York Times evaluation.
10:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Moving on to other California election results that have national significance, there's a key test of whether Democrats can flip a Latino district that's switched to Trump.
10:49
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the congressional primary in the central valley between the Fresno and Bakersfield, California 22, fascinating contest in the poorest, most Latino district in the state,
11:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Trump won this district in 2024 by 1.8 percentage points before that Biden had won by 13 points.
11:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is one of those places where Latinos switched to Trump in 2024.
11:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is a Republican incumbent running for reelection, David Valadillo.
11:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Valadillo's district has the highest
11:33
[SPEAKER_01]: currently represented by a Republican, nevertheless, Validale voted to slash federal funding for medical, even though two-thirds of his constituents rely on it for health care.
11:44
[SPEAKER_01]: So he has become one of the top targets for Democrats to flip this seat in November.
11:51
[SPEAKER_01]: This is also significant because it's the sight of a battle between the progressive wing of the Democrats and the establishment of the party
12:00
[SPEAKER_01]: The party has indoor is pretty much indoors.
12:03
[SPEAKER_01]: The D triple C has endorsed state representative Jazz Meat Banes, who's also supported by pro Israel money.
12:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And is described as a quote moderate.
12:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's being challenged in the primary by a grassroots progressive endorsed by Bernie and AOC and the Laura Square to Randy Villegas.
12:25
[SPEAKER_01]: The results, as of now, as we speak, 72% reporting, David Valadeo, 42% progressive Randy Villagas, 31% centrist democrat, Jasmine Baines, 27%, not yet clear who the, which of the democrats will go into the final, but total of the democratic vote is itself kind of significant.
12:49
[SPEAKER_02]: It is.
12:50
[SPEAKER_02]: The valide was at the moment holding support in the low 40s, means he served as put a bullseye around himself.
13:02
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just not auger well for his prospects in November.
13:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And of the five
13:08
[SPEAKER_02]: districts that the Democrats redistrict in response to the five districts that their Republicans redistrict in Texas.
13:16
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the closest to a swing district.
13:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think these results suggest that it will with the other four swing democratic.
13:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I should also add that the raw numbers of voters in this district is far lower than that of any of the other 52 congressional districts in California, which reflects a the poverty of most district residents, which is reflected in the rate of Medicaid recipients.
13:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And also the fact that there are a hell of a lot of undocumented farm workers in this district
13:54
[SPEAKER_02]: to the Republican belief that undocumented immigrants flocked to the polls and cast ballots, they don't.
14:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, if I were betting, I would bet that Randy Villegas would win the second slot and go up against Validero in November and handle it when the district.
14:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, the Senate is in play as we have been told many times and I want to talk a little bit about Maine because his Maine has a primary this week, Tuesday.
14:29
[SPEAKER_01]: We do not yet have the results of the primary as we speak, but Graham Plattener is the Democratic candidate.
14:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Democrats cannot take the Senate without winning Maine without defeating Susan Collins.
14:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the only blue state with an incumbent Republican senator.
14:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Now she does have a few notable anti-Trump
14:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Elements in her record.
14:52
[SPEAKER_01]: She did vote to impeach Trump.
14:55
[SPEAKER_01]: But she supported him something like 96% of the time on everything else in the Senate.
15:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And just now she has signed on as the 50th and decisive supporter of the Pernicious Save Act.
15:08
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the voter suppression proposal.
15:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Trump has Demanded that the Senate pass which requires proof of citizenship to register to vote.
15:16
[SPEAKER_01]: So Susan Collins has made click share
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: This will come to a vote, probably be a tie, and probably J.D.
15:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Vance will break the tie in favor of the Republicans.
15:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Graham Platner is the Democrats candidate.
15:30
[SPEAKER_01]: He's been leading slightly in the polls, but in the last week he's been attacked by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
15:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us of what this is about.
15:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Initially, this was about his sexting, several women in the period immediately following his marriage, and then it became the accounts of several women who said he came on to them way too much, was abusive in what dating they had with him, and one of those women
16:07
[SPEAKER_02]: said alleged that he had gotten really physically abusive with their no one else who said that and given where it comes from there has to be, you know, some degree of at least skepticism about this.
16:22
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, let's also keep in mind that Susan Collins voted to confirm all three of Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominees who voted to essentially revoke Rovey Wade.
16:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Grand Plattener supports Rovey Wade and supports reinstating American women's right to abortions.
16:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So if the question is, who can you rely on to support women's rights?
16:51
[SPEAKER_02]: It's no question.
16:51
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not Susan Collins.
16:53
[SPEAKER_02]: It's Grand Plattener.
16:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, now it's time for news of the class struggle in California, regular feature of this broadcast.
17:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about the world cup.
17:04
[SPEAKER_01]: The opening for the U.S. team is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles on Friday at so-fi stadium in Inglewood.
17:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's been intense negotiations for the last two days about the threat of a strike at the World Cup opening for the U.S. team at so-fi stadium in L.A., where do we stand on that at this hour?
17:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, this was the local 11 of the hotel and restaurant workers, which is a storied local and a storied local and defending immigrant rights.
17:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And significant part, because its members are disproportionately immigrants.
17:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And 2000 of them are the food servers and repairs and sellers at SOFI Stadium.
17:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So they were having the regular contractual issues with the contracting company about wages and such.
17:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And as we speak on Tuesday, they have managed to settle back.
18:03
[SPEAKER_02]: However, they reserve the right.
18:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And this has been their issue from the beginning of this process.
18:08
[SPEAKER_02]: They reserve the right to go off the job.
18:11
[SPEAKER_02]: if ice agents appear in so-fi stadium that is both a principal issue in an existential issue since there are doubt with some undocumented immigrants among the people who will be preparing and selling and serving food to the people at the attendees at the stadium and there will be a lot of immigrants.
18:31
[SPEAKER_02]: believe me.
18:32
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a Los Angeles crowd.
18:35
[SPEAKER_02]: There'll be a lot of immigrants and so if I study him for what will be the first match featuring the U.S. team in the World Cup.
18:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Harold Morrison, pretty mad prospect that heard.
18:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Harold, thanks for talking with us today.
18:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it's good to be here, John.
19:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Can A.I.
19:03
[SPEAKER_01]: write good poetry?
19:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Katha Pollett wanted to find out.
19:07
[SPEAKER_01]: She's an award-winning poet herself, and also an essayist in columnist for the nation.
19:12
[SPEAKER_01]: She also writes for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times.
19:16
[SPEAKER_01]: We reach her today at Home in Manhattan.
19:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Katha, welcome back.
19:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Hi, John.
19:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me on the show.
19:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously AI is good at some things, especially finding and summarizing information, which is kind of the opposite of poetry.
19:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I ask AI to people think AI can write good poetry, and the answer is yes.
19:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I learned that I learned that a 2024 study found that non-expert readers could not tell the difference between AI-generated poems and human-written ones, and actually like the AI-written poems better.
19:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So by this measure, the answer to the question, at least do ordinary readers think
20:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I just want to say that if people don't read poetry as most people do not, then they're not going to be able to make a good judgment about what poems are good.
20:19
[SPEAKER_03]: So I completely discount the results of your research.
20:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
20:25
[SPEAKER_01]: You sent out to run your own test of the ability of AI to write good poetry.
20:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about that.
20:31
[SPEAKER_03]: I did.
20:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I was really mad because, and thought because you probably know, stole the writing, like 500,000 books and articles, it stole them to train its large language models.
20:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And I am due, $15,000 from them because of that.
20:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just am furious that they don't ask, I would have said no.
20:52
[SPEAKER_03]: It's plagiarism to do this without asking.
20:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So anyway, they have to pay all this money, which I mean, I'll be surprised if I ever
21:01
[SPEAKER_03]: But it just got me to thinking about the capacities of AI.
21:08
[SPEAKER_03]: So I asked it to write poems in the style of Catholic politics.
21:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
21:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Last year I did this and it came out with something like was like a hallmark card greeting.
21:20
[SPEAKER_03]: But since then it's been taking poetry workshops and this is where your study shows that it can imitate conventional styles and modes of feeling.
21:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to hear one?
21:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
21:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so this is what it gets from its imaginary poetry workshops.
21:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Reverse and whistfulness are in.
21:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So here's how one begins.
21:42
[SPEAKER_03]: The meeting runs long as meetings do.
21:44
[SPEAKER_03]: A table of voices, mostly baritone, interrupted by a careful soprano that learns to fold itself between commas.
21:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Outside, the city conducts its own debate, sirens insisting buses sying dissent.
22:00
[SPEAKER_03]: A woman on the corner counting tips like a rosary of small survival.
22:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so bad, but it has the ticks and conventions of magazine poetry of our time.
22:15
[SPEAKER_03]: The Carol is next metaphor, looking out the window, the knowing nudge, like saying, as meetings, the meeting runs on as meetings do, as we all know, that kind of thing.
22:25
[SPEAKER_03]: It just makes me want to cringe and if not throw up.
22:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's subject was also infuriating, which is that the subtle thwarting of women in the office and at home, because later there's a line.
22:38
[SPEAKER_03]: At home, the sink stages it's quiet rebellion.
22:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And point me for laughing.
22:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you know, and women's inability to do much about it.
22:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And you get one cliche after another.
22:50
[SPEAKER_03]: There's just nothing fresher original, no wit, or zing, no pressure on language.
22:55
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's full of these decorative phrases.
22:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I hate this, like the stubborn verb of living.
23:02
[SPEAKER_03]: It sounds poetic, but it doesn't do any work.
23:06
[SPEAKER_03]: So what really upsets me, John, and still does.
23:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm getting all upsets.
23:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Thinking about it again, is that this is what chatGPT
23:20
[SPEAKER_03]: obedient, saddish, feminist quote unquote, but defeated, you know, and then I wrote, you know, get that woman to dishwasher.
23:27
[SPEAKER_03]: What's her problem?
23:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is not how I write, but it has enough echoes of my writing that I was anxious and unsettled all day, and I still am.
23:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And you think, is that really me, of me, that the world can see, but I can't,
23:43
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I just saw it.
23:45
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
23:46
[SPEAKER_03]: That perhaps that surprises you.
23:48
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
23:49
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like the uncanny valley version of me.
23:52
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a stepford writer.
23:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's so disturbing that this is happening.
23:59
[SPEAKER_03]: So then I tried another poem, another, I tried Grock.
24:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, Grock, as you may remember, I was already familiar with it because I asked Grock, which does these horrible deep fakes, to put Queen Elizabeth
24:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Melania Trump and me in bikinis.
24:18
[SPEAKER_03]: That was another shocker, you know, I really don't want to see that.
24:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Melania looked great as it's not surprising.
24:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So I asked her to put to write, I asked Grog to write a cathapolic poem.
24:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And this was even worse.
24:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, get this.
24:33
[SPEAKER_03]: We fold the laundry like it's a treaty with the state of being female.
24:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Now,
24:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, first of all, like it's a tree should be as if it's a tree, and do you fold the tree?
24:46
[SPEAKER_03]: What does that mean?
24:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And then it says it offered said, I'll revise this for more urgency and intensity it said, and it did that several times.
24:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And each time the poem was worse, so then we get
25:00
[SPEAKER_03]: We fold the laundry, like it's the last thin barrier before the state storms the house.
25:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And believe me, you know, the state was about to storm the house.
25:10
[SPEAKER_03]: No one would be worrying about folding the pillow.
25:13
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's just ridiculous.
25:15
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, this was really disgusting.
25:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Somewhere a judge is sharpening his pan like a scalpel, writing rulings that feel like fingers inside us.
25:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Ooh, how disgusting.
25:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And you don't sharpen a pen.
25:28
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, not since the 19th century, or a scal... You don't sharpen a scalpel.
25:33
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, it's just all kind of word, word fog.
25:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So then I tried clawed because that's the AI of the moment.
25:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we'll visit what they get.
25:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Outside, it's the same thing.
25:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Outside the window outside, the street does what streets do.
25:52
[SPEAKER_03]: A woman holds a stroller up the curb alone.
25:56
[SPEAKER_03]: A man in a good coat looks at his phone.
25:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Two pigeons share a grievance near the trash.
26:02
[SPEAKER_03]: The usual arrangements, the usual cost.
26:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Now what does that mean?
26:05
[SPEAKER_03]: The street does what streets do.
26:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Go from here to there.
26:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, what is?
26:10
[SPEAKER_03]: What does that mean?
26:11
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, okay, so then I asked it a whole bunch of other things.
26:14
[SPEAKER_03]: So, grock on the death of Genghis Khan, I thought, let's get away from this feminism's fake feminism.
26:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that was the tense fold, the horses move on, the grass forgets.
26:26
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, and I said, okay, let's try a classic topic of poems, including some of my favorites, daffodils, and then you get, so here they are again, the yellow-headed hooligans of spring.
26:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, it's like that this faint sour fog of exhaustion and depression that hangs over every poem.
26:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And what is wrong with them, you know?
26:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And I say, you know, did a cloud habit's heart broken by a washing machine?
26:54
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a rock-put-chat GPT in an ugly bikini.
26:58
[SPEAKER_03]: It's where you realize that these machines do not have human feelings.
27:03
[SPEAKER_03]: So they're just baking it.
27:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I ask Gemini, that's the Google AI.
27:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I pay for Gemini Pro in the belief that they'll give you a better version, a smarter version.
27:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I ask Gemini Pro, do you think AI would be able to write good poetry?
27:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And their answer was,
27:26
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the paid answer now, AI can absolutely write poetry, but if your standard is art, writing that surprises or shifts how the reader sees the world, AI falls completely flat.
27:41
[SPEAKER_01]: The mechanics of AI are fundamentally at odds with the requirements of real poetry.
27:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought this is pretty insightful.
27:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's because the core of the large language model AI,
27:56
[SPEAKER_01]: is predicting the most statistically probable next word.
28:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that's kind of the opposite of poetry, which does surprise, and to come up with something new in original.
28:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jim and I pro understands that.
28:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Jim and I pro said, A.I.
28:13
[SPEAKER_01]: naturally gravitates towards cliches.
28:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It chooses a safe poetic word, describing the moon as silver, or a heart as heavy, rather than a strange word.
28:26
[SPEAKER_01]: so it can write in the form of whatever form you give it.
28:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It can count syllables, so it can write a sonnet or a high-cooler.
28:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I am a pentameter, but Gemini Pro said, it is only aggregating the ways thousands of other people have done the same thing.
28:47
[SPEAKER_01]: So hey, I understand why it can't write
28:56
[SPEAKER_01]: prefer the AI poem to promise written by humans?
29:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I think the answer is that ordinary people, and here I'm going to sound very elitist, they like things that are predictable.
29:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Here's something that happened to me, the first poetry class I ever taught.
29:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I commented on a student's poem, said, well, you know, this is a little sentimental, and he said, what's wrong with that?
29:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And I didn't really have a good answer for that.
29:26
[SPEAKER_03]: But some people, most people, like things that are predictable, accessible, no surprises of vocabulary that is, you don't have to look any words up in the dictionary, and that's because they're not into poetry enough or at all to experience what's original and wonderful about it.
29:54
[SPEAKER_01]: they're usually conventional.
29:56
[SPEAKER_03]: They're completely conventional.
29:57
[SPEAKER_03]: They're conventional in language, if not in, you know, another vampire novel, okay, with very conventional language.
30:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's because they don't know how to do the kind of work it takes to read something that's a little bit out of their wheelhouse.
30:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And they don't want that.
30:18
[SPEAKER_03]: People like things that are very
30:22
[SPEAKER_03]: people like to go to chain restaurants because they know what they're going to get.
30:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I asked Paid AI what it thinks a cathopolyph poem is like.
30:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh God.
30:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Do I want to hear this?
30:39
[SPEAKER_03]: What did it say?
30:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Pollots poetry pairs precise imagery and restrained craft with intimate often witty subject matter, turning the ordinary events of life into brilliant, poignant and often funny poems, close quote.
30:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, yeah, so, uh, do you recognize any of that?
31:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, here's the funny thing.
31:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, a poet friend of mine, uh, put asked what,
31:07
[SPEAKER_03]: chat to the PT or whichever one it was, and I think of their poetry, and it came back with all this flattering remarks, and the her friend did the same, and got more flattering words.
31:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's because it's just like when they're, when they're psychotic, you know, your computer psychiatrist, they are trained to flatter you, that's what they do.
31:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think that they just have a bias toward making you feel good, except when they're trying to get you to kill yourself.
31:46
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm also looking to happen.
31:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this quote, I asked them and I said, do you have a source for this information?
31:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Turns out, it's from the Amazon website description of the Mind Body Problem, your award-winning first book.
32:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, just found it because that's what they're very good at searching the web.
32:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not very hard to go to Amazon and look up Catholic policy.
32:13
[SPEAKER_01]: How our work is described.
32:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not really their idea.
32:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It's what they found that is not wrong.
32:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And some couldn't be wrong because it's the publicity for your book.
32:25
[SPEAKER_03]: That was my second book actually.
32:28
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
32:30
[SPEAKER_03]: They are scraping the web and finding just very accessible things.
32:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, they could have gone to the web and found like a terrible review.
32:42
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and put that up.
32:44
[SPEAKER_03]: What's very discouraging about it is that, you know, people say I'm not going to use it for this, I'm not going to use it for that.
32:50
[SPEAKER_03]: But fast forward in 20 years, well, people still be saying that I don't think so.
32:56
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, we're already, you know, students just are cheating unbelievable quantities.
33:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Now they have people trying to submit manuscripts that are AI.
33:05
[SPEAKER_03]: People admit that they're well-known writers who admit, oh yeah, I use them to help just to help me get a first draft.
33:12
[SPEAKER_03]: A first draft is where you do some very important work.
33:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not just getting an outline, it's thinking and AI cannot think.
33:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So, it's very discouraging to me because I think in the history of the world people tend to choose the easier thing.
33:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And so each technology, whether or not it's as good as the one before, tends to take over.
33:34
[SPEAKER_03]: For example, CDs are out.
33:37
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, first vinyl was out, then CD, now CD's are out, and Spotify is in Spotify is a very inferior product, but it's easier than a CD, don't have to put something in something else.
33:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't think, Katha Pollett, wrote about A.I.
33:52
[SPEAKER_01]: as a Timsterright Poetry in her column for The Nation.
33:56
[SPEAKER_01]: You can read it at TheNation.com.
33:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Katha, thank you for your wit and zing.
34:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And thanks for talking with us today.
34:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, thanks for your wit and zing also.
34:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't hang me on this, though.
34:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Just your bad, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man, right man,
34:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Start making sense.
34:18
[SPEAKER_01]: A podcast from the Nation Magazine is recorded at our upstairs studio in Los Angeles.
34:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer.
34:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Ricky D'Ambrose is executive producer, Boskarsun Kara is president of the nation, Katrina Van Nouvelle is editor and publisher of the nation.
34:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Our theme music is Barcelona Afrobeat, License by Creative Commons.
34:43
[SPEAKER_01]: You can find out more about start making sense at thenation.com and subscribe to start making sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
34:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weiner, thanks for listening.