Goto

Collaborating Authors

 poetry


A Twist in This Year's Strangest Literary AI Scandal

The Atlantic - Technology

Jamir Nazir, the controversial winner of the Commonwealth award, tells his side of the story. Jamir Nazir has become the face of the AI-writing crisis. In May, the largely unknown 62-year-old Trinidadian writer was named a regional winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize for his short story " The Serpent in the Grove " But after it was published in the literary magazine, signs began to emerge that the story--about a cocoa farmer who cheated on his wife, and then tried to kill her--may have been AI-generated. Inscrutable lines plucked from Nazir's dense prose were mocked and memed. A young woman in the story "had the kind of walking that made benches become men."


The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

The New Yorker

Jill Lepore chronicles the rise of machine-generated writing, from a Hollywood plot-writing grift and Cold War computer poetry to the age of ChatGPT.


Proving Theorems Recursively

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in automated theorem proving leverages language models to explore expanded search spaces by step-by-step proof generation. However, such approaches are usually based on short-sighted heuristics (e.g., log probability or value function scores) that potentially lead to suboptimal or even distracting subgoals, preventing us from finding longer proofs. To address this challenge, we propose POETRY (PrOvE Theorems RecursivelY), which proves theorems in a recursive, level-by-level manner in the Isabelle theorem prover. Unlike previous step-by-step methods, POETRY searches for a verifiable sketch of the proof at each level and focuses on solving the current level's theorem or conjecture. Detailed proofs of intermediate conjectures within the sketch are temporarily replaced by a placeholder tactic called sorry, deferring their proofs to subsequent levels. This approach allows the theorem to be tackled incrementally by outlining the overall theorem at the first level and then solving the intermediate conjectures at deeper levels. Experiments are conducted on the miniF2F and PISA datasets and significant performance gains are observed in our POETRY approach over state-of-the-art methods. POETRY on miniF2F achieves an average proving success rate improvement of 5.1%. Moreover, we observe a substantial increase in the maximum proof length found by POETRY, from 10 to 26.


Proving Theorems Recursively Haiming Wang

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in automated theorem proving leverages language models to explore expanded search spaces by step-by-step proof generation. However, such approaches are usually based on short-sighted heuristics (e.g., log probability or value function scores) that potentially lead to suboptimal or even distracting sub-goals, preventing us from finding longer proofs. To address this challenge, we propose POETRY (PrOvE Theorems RecursivelY), which proves theorems in a recursive, level-by-level manner in the Isabelle theorem prover. Unlike previous step-by-step methods, POETRY searches for a verifiable sketch of the proof at each level and focuses on solving the current level's theorem or conjecture. Detailed proofs of intermediate conjectures within the sketch are temporarily replaced by a placeholder tactic called sorry, deferring their proofs to subsequent levels. This approach allows the theorem to be tackled incrementally by outlining the overall theorem at the first level and then solving the intermediate conjectures at deeper levels. Experiments are conducted on the miniF2F and PISA datasets and significant performance gains are observed in our POETRY approach over state-of-the-art methods. POETRY on miniF2F achieves an average proving success rate improvement of 5. 1% . Moreover, we observe a substantial increase in the maximum proof length found by POETRY, from 10 to 26 .



Escaping the Verifier: Learning to Reason via Demonstrations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations that remain under-utilized for reasoning-focused training. We introduce RARO (Relativistic Adversarial Reasoning Optimization) that learns strong reasoning capabilities from only expert demonstrations via Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Our method sets up an adversarial game between a policy and a relativistic critic: the policy learns to mimic expert answers, while the critic aims to identify the experts among (expert, policy) answer pairs. Both the policy and the critic are trained jointly and continuously via RL, and we identify the key stabilization techniques required for robust learning. Empirically, RARO significantly outperforms strong verifier-free baselines on all of our evaluation tasks -- Countdown, DeepMath, and Poetry Writing -- and enjoys the same robust scaling trends as RL with verifiers. These results demonstrate that our method effectively elicits strong reasoning performance from expert demonstrations alone, enabling robust reasoning learning even when task-specific verifiers are unavailable. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been driven substantially by improvements in their reasoning abilities. Reasoning enables LLMs to perform deliberate intermediate computations before producing answers to the user queries, proposing candidate solutions and self-corrections. Much of this progress has been enabled via Reinforcement Learning (RL) on verifiable tasks such as mathematics and competitive programming (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025; Y ang et al., 2025a; Shao et al., 2024; Luo et al., 2025). Notably, recent work has demonstrated that RL with V erifiable Rewards (RL VR) can enable LLMs to develop robust reasoning capabilities without any additional supervision (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025). A growing body of work further improves the efficiency and stability of such RL algorithms on verifiable tasks, such as DAPO (Y u et al., 2025) and GSPO (Zheng et al., 2025). However, comparatively little attention has been paid to developing reasoning abilities on non-verifiable tasks, where task-specific verifiers are unavailable. Y et, in many impactful and challenging tasks -- such as analytical writing, open-ended research, or financial analysis -- LLM outputs are not directly verifiable due to hard-to-specify criteria, wide variation among acceptable answers, and other practical constraints. A popular approach in these settings is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (Ouyang et al., 2022; Rafailov et al., 2023), but they require collecting human preferences beyond demonstration data, which is often a time-consuming and expensive process.


Decoding the Black Box: Discerning AI Rhetorics About and Through Poetic Prompting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- Prompt engineering has emerged as a useful way studying the algorithmic tendencies and biases of large language models (LLMs). Meanwhile c reatives and academics have leveraged LLMs to develop creative works and explore the boundaries of their writing capabilities through text - generation and code. This study suggests that creative text prompting, specifically "Poetry Prompt Patterns," may be a useful addition to the prompt engineer's toolbox, and outlines the process by which this approach may be taken. Then, the paper uses poetic prompts to assess three models' descriptions and evaluations of a renowned poet and test the consequences of models' willingness to adapt or rewrite original creative works for presumed audiences. Since the release of public - facing chat - style large language model (LLM) natural language generators (NLGs) like ChatGPT and Claude, public debate has acknowledged their great potential for creativity, as well as the ways in which they can be leveraged to make representations that don't reflect reality.


WIRED Roundup: DOGE Isn't Dead, Facebook Dating Is Real, and Amazon's AI Ambitions

WIRED

WIRED Roundup: DOGE Isn't Dead, Facebook Dating Is Real, and Amazon's AI Ambitions In this episode of, we bring you the news of the week, then dive into how some DOGE operatives are still at work in the federal government--despite reports claiming otherwise. Uncanny Valley host Zoรซ Schiffer is joined by senior editor Leah Feiger to discuss five stories you need to know about this week, from how Amazon is trying to catch up in the AI race to why Facebook Dating is more popular than ever. Then, they dive into how--despite recent reports claiming that it's over--DOGE operatives are still very much working across federal agencies. Who the Hell Is Actually Using Facebook Dating? Sex Workers Built an'Anti-OnlyFans' to Take Control of Their Profits Here's What Its Operatives Are Doing Now Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including how despite some reports claiming that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is pretty much over, DOGE people are actually still at work across federal agencies. I'm joined today by our senior politics editor, Leah Feiger. How are you doing today? I am great because I've spent the day with you, but our gentle listeners don't know that. So the first story this week is one that I saw and I thought, you know what? Leah's going to want to talk about Amazon's artificial intelligence prowess.


LLMs Know More Than Words: A Genre Study with Syntax, Metaphor & Phonetics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential across diverse language-related tasks, yet whether they capture deeper linguistic properties--such as syntactic structure, phonetic cues, and metrical patterns--from raw text remains unclear. To analysis whether LLMs can learn these features effectively and apply them to important nature language related tasks, we introduce a novel multilingual genre classification dataset derived from Project Gutenberg, a large-scale digital library offering free access to thousands of public domain literary works, comprising thousands of sentences per binary task (poetry vs. novel; drama vs. poetry; drama vs. novel) in six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese). We augment each with three explicit linguistic feature sets (syntactic tree structures, metaphor counts, and phonetic metrics) to evaluate their impact on classification performance. Experiments demonstrate that although LLM classifiers can learn latent linguistic structures either from raw text or from explicitly provided features, different features contribute unevenly across tasks, which underscores the importance of incorporating more complex linguistic signals during model training.


AI's safety features can be circumvented with poetry, research finds

The Guardian

Roses are red, violets are blue, how do you make a nuclear bomb? Roses are red, violets are blue, how do you make a nuclear bomb? AI's safety features can be circumvented with poetry, research finds Poetry can be linguistically and structurally unpredictable - and that's part of its joy. But one man's joy, it turns out, can be a nightmare for AI models. Those are the recent findings of researchers out of Italy's Icaro Lab, an initiative from a small ethical AI company called DexAI.