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Record W4415033376 · doi:10.22148/001c.144825

Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse

2025· article· en· W4415033376 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Ryan Heuser

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Cultural Analytics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicDigital Humanities and Scholarship
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGenerative grammarFeature (linguistics)Interpretation (philosophy)Set (abstract data type)Natural language

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper examines the formal and aesthetic patterns of AI-generated poems through a series of computational experiments. Through analyses of rhyme and rhythm, it reveals how large language models (LLMs) exhibit a stubborn, formal stuckness in their outputs. The paper demonstrates that LLMs often ossify poetic forms by producing formally conservative texts that adhere more rigidly to traditional poetic conventions than even the most formally strict periods of literary history. The paper interprets these findings as evidence of a computational logic of idealization that privileges the satisfaction of formal expectation over its artful frustration, regularity over variation, and conformity over contradiction. It proposes “generative formalism” as a critical framework that extends traditional as well as quantitative and formalist methods to understand how generative systems process, flatten, and reify cultural production.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.926
Threshold uncertainty score0.489

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.283
Teacher spread0.234 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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