Brendan Foody: belief

Transcript context

…I don’t know. I don’t trust contemporary poets, frankly. There aren’t many of them I like to read. Maybe Geoffrey Hill would be one. Some are too postmodern. Some maybe are too woke. Some are too identity-driven. I love older poetry, so it’s not that I don’t like poetry. I worry about putting them — they’re not quite in charge, I get that, but giving them so much leeway. It does evoke this really interesting idea of how we want to teach models and measure the success of these models. Is it via consensus? Is it via a handful of the top experts in that given domain? There’s really no correct answer. I think that different AI labs, different researchers will go down different routes, and that will frame the ways that these products feel and the things that they ultimately achieve. Maybe we should only enshrine the current age when the current age is at a peak. Scott Sumner says the best movies were maybe made in the 1960s and ’70s. Whether or not you agree, you could have movie evaluators be only from that time. There are some still alive. If you think the best heavy metal, say, comes from the 1980s, well, you wouldn’t have the current evaluators. You would pick evaluators from the ’80s. The best poetry does seem, by most people’s standards, to be really quite old, and we can’t resurrect those individuals. But the notion that you enshrine current taste when taste changes so much — it’s a very interesting decision.…

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