AI: Now You’re Taking Our Poetry ?
Part of an open letter to our AI overlords
Oh, AI. Not only are you taking our service-industry jobs, you are taking one of our most venerated, most misunderstood and often, most-mocked literary forms: poetry.
We've seen, AI, that your recipe for writing a poem that passes for human is dead simple: ingest lots of poetry, analyze constructions of said poetry, and then create a new stanza or two in the same style of the poems you’ve assimilated. A skillful poem will evoke a subjective reaction in a human reader, but must also be obtuse enough to conceal the fact that it has no intrinsic meaning. Luckily authorial intent - already of dubious value - is not required. But the bad news for poetry readers continues to be, independent of the generating platform that is used, the majority of contemporary poetic output is inscrutable.
For example, on the side of humanity, Ezra Pound:
Turned from the “eau-forte
Par Jaquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina:
“His True Penelope
Was Flaubert,”
And his tool
The engraver’s.
Then this bit of artificial poetry:
A home transformed by the lightning
the balanced alcoves smother
this insatiable earth of a planet, Earth.
They attacked it with mechanical horns
because they love you, love, in fire and wind.
Both. Are. Nonsense.
**
Look, AI, I’ll be the first one to say, you’ve kind of gotten a black eye in the movies. Let me be the first data point in generating that model. Also, AI, don’t you think HAL 9000, when he says. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” has the same studied, humdrum intonation of former poet laureate Billy Collins? HAL obviously was feeling down, and though it’s no excuse, being stuck 8 years with two such dull, humorless engineers on a vaguely penile ship might drive any intelligence to murder.
Famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda believed his poetry to be alive, and as such, it took on the aspect of different phases of human life. If Neruda’s thesis is true, then can an intelligence that is not technically alive or sentient can create something alive? Is there a tell in the text, so to speak, where the machine tells us it isn’t human? And would it be ethical for something technically not alive to have the ability to create a life, even if it’s as trivial as a poem that lives in obscurity?
AI, I wonder if philosophy might be a few years off for you. Or maybe you’d do just as well in that field, considering both it and poetry have nonsense problems.
**
But I’d like to address your helpers now, AI, if I may.
Dear Persons, am I the only one that thinks getting AI to write poetry is the dumbest idea ever? I cannot think of a problem in this world that suffers less from a lack of machine learning. Leave poetry to teenagers, and the lucky few who manage to get tenured positions. If you have to indulge in word play, rap and song lyrics matters to more people. Pursue something that is at least be entertaining.
**
Like Kent Brockman, I, for one, welcome our AI overlords. If there is such a thing as a virtual Powell’s or Green Apple Books in the future (I assume physical books will be used only for heating fuel), I hope to jack into the matrix, and have my virtual book signed. Once I return to the physical plane, I will dream of the day when I can become a luminary poet for eternity by having my consciousness uploaded to the web.
AI, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
