The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has created a huge demand for data, especially high-quality data that can train AI models to perform complex tasks such as natural language generation, image recognition, and speech synthesis. But how do you ensure that the data you feed to your AI is accurate, diverse, and relevant? And how do you make your AI more creative, expressive, and human-like?
One answer is to hire poets.
That’s what some of the leading AI data training companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are doing. These companies provide data annotation, collection, and validation services to some of the biggest names in AI development, such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft. They are responsible for creating and curating the data sets that power the most advanced AI systems in the world, such as GPT-3, the largest language model ever created.
But these companies are not just looking for any data workers. They are looking for poets, novelists, playwrights, and writers with advanced degrees or years of experience in literary fields. They are also looking for writers in languages other than English, such as Hindi and Japanese. These writers are asked to write original short stories on a given topic, and to provide feedback on the quality of the AI-generated text. The goal is to improve the literary and creative skills of the AI models, and to make them more fluent, coherent, and engaging.
Why poets?
Poets are not only experts in language, but also in creativity, imagination, and emotion. They know how to craft words, sentences, and stories that can captivate, inspire, and move readers. They also know how to use different forms, styles, and techniques to convey meaning and expression. These are the skills that AI models need to master if they want to generate natural and compelling text, such as poems, lyrics, stories, and dialogues.
Poets can also help AI models overcome some of the common challenges and limitations of natural language generation, such as repetition, inconsistency, irrelevance, and lack of originality. Poets can provide the AI models with diverse and rich data samples that can expand their vocabulary, knowledge, and perspective. Poets can also evaluate the AI-generated text and provide constructive feedback and suggestions that can help the AI models improve their performance and quality.
Poets can also benefit from working with AI models. They can learn new skills, such as data annotation, and gain exposure to new technologies, such as generative AI. They can also explore new forms of creative expression and collaboration, and discover new possibilities and opportunities for their own writing.
The future of AI and poetry
The collaboration between AI and poetry is not new. In fact, it dates back to the 1950s, when the first computer-generated poem was created by a machine called Illiac I at the University of Illinois. Since then, many researchers and artists have experimented with using AI to generate, analyze, and enhance poetry, such as Racter, a program that wrote a book of poems called The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed in 1984, or Poemage, a tool that visualizes the sound patterns of poems.
But the recent advances in AI, especially in natural language generation, have opened up new horizons and possibilities for AI and poetry. AI models can now generate more complex, diverse, and coherent texts, and can even mimic the style and voice of famous poets, such as Shakespeare, Dickinson, or Neruda. AI models can also interact with human poets, and create collaborative and hybrid works, such as the AI Dungeon, a text-based adventure game that uses GPT-3 to generate stories based on the user’s input.
The future of AI and poetry is exciting and promising, but also challenging and uncertain. There are many ethical, social, and cultural issues and questions that need to be addressed, such as the ownership, authorship, and quality of the AI-generated text, the impact of AI on the human creativity and identity, and the role and responsibility of the human poets and writers who work with AI. These issues and questions require careful and critical reflection and discussion, and the involvement and participation of all the stakeholders, including the AI developers, the data workers, the poets, and the readers.
AI data training companies like Scale AI are hiring poets, and they are not alone. They are part of a larger trend and movement that recognizes the value and importance of poetry and creativity in the development and application of AI. They are also part of a larger vision and mission that aims to create AI that is not only intelligent, but also human.
