To be better at poetry, LLMs must be programmed with rewards for useful unusualness. They are usually built to minimise surprise (or perplexity) by predicting the most likely words. Poets target meaningful surprise – triggering a neural spike & asking us to see the world afresh.

Poets can make the familiar strange & the strange familiar: “The evening is spread out against the sky”. An LLM predicts.. “…like a blanket of stars.”. A poet writes “like a patient et...