Image Credit: Possessed Photography
Written by Fi / F.M Papaz (@fmpapaz)
If you’re a technology-challenged poet like me, whose browser activities don’t elevate past Google Suite, I can probably guess your feelings on the use of Artificial Intelligence in poetry and literature. We have many reasons to fear the murky territory of AI, especially in regards to the ethical concerns around privacy, intellectual property and plagiarism.
But should we be so quick to toss out the tube-grown baby with the bathwater?
I pushed my discomfort aside and asked the biddable bot itself – Chat GPT.
Fi: Do you think you should be used for writing poems?
ChatGPT: Certainly! I can be a helpful tool for generating ideas, providing inspiration, or even assisting in the drafting process when it comes to writing poems. Whether you're looking for creative prompts, exploring different styles, or seeking assistance with specific elements of your poem, I'm here to help.
However, it's important to note that while I can generate content, the true depth and personal touch in poetry often come from the unique voice and experiences of the poet. So, consider using me as a tool to complement your creative process rather than replace it entirely.
Wow, that’s very intellectually honest of you Chat-bae.
This was my first time using the tech, so I spent a couple minutes poking around to test its capabilities before I got bored. Hilariously, both Chat-bae and Google’s Bard, could not produce for me a poem without an AABB rhyme scheme, no matter how many times I asked it to rewrite it. But I digress.
Last year, in an effort to diversify my poetry arsenal, I sought out various workshops online and stumbled upon, ‘If, Then: Technology & Poetics.’ They are a working group and monthly workshop series that “bring together writers, coders, and scholars investigating the relationships between humans and machines and the works of art, literature, and visual knowledge they produce together.”
It is their founder Carly Schnitzler’s belief that, “writing itself is a technology—creative computational practices bring this truth into sharp and productively defamiliarizing relief.” She started ‘If, Then’ in the Fall of 2020 “as a way to connect with others invested in creative computation and to create an accessible, friendly, and generative space for folks, of all backgrounds and interests, to explore creative computational methods in their writing and art-making practices.” Their archives are available for free online and all their workshops are free, virtual and open to everyone.
Via the ‘If, Then’ community, I have discovered many creatives doing mind-boggling things with Tech. In one of the first workshops I attended, Amira Hanifa presented their digital work CreaTures Glossary.
Amira is interested in “language as material,” and the way that our use of words to categorize, has a by-product of the “particularities [being] blurred in the naming.” Her project, which you can find at this website address, desires to provide a space for nonviolent language; pushing back on our human tendency to assign categorization that will inevitably fall short of sufficiently capturing phenomena or beings.
Amira encourages free play and contributions to the definitions of the words provided on the website, a living, digital dictionary that reflects the evolutionary reality of language. My favorite function is the ‘Interview with a Word’ function which you can find by:
> Start by defining a word
> Select one of the terms on the left, E.g. “regeneration”
> Scroll to beneath the second text box.
> Read but also contribute answers to questions asked and answered as if you were that word’s persona.
Another poet and smarty-pants programmer I was introduced to from ‘If, Then’ is Natalie Jane Edson. On her website - https://nataliejaneedson.com/poetry-tool/ - she has some very intuitive, very fun poetry tools that go by the following names: Cut Up Machine, Erasure, Homolinguistic Translator, Marshmallow Experiment 1 and Mirror Poems. I promise you endless awe and the unblocking of any stuck poem if you play around with these tools! Please credit Natalie if you use her free tools.
Natalie and Amira are just two examples of brilliant, creative minds dispelling myths around the compatibility of technology and poetics.
I asked Natalie to provide me further insight into her philosophy around the use of AI in poetry. She said, and I conclude (emphatic, exclamation mark implied) with her response:
“The idea that current AI language models can only make poetry worse reeks of the same cynicism that makes people ask: is it even possible to write anything new? Hasn’t it already all been said before?
The answer is of course not, because we’ve never had a world like this. We’ve never had the same people here. I am a different artist than I was yesterday, and I’m also a different artist than anyone else I have ever met. If you give a room of poets a prompt or a set of words from which to write a poem, it is inconceivable that any two poets would come up with identical works.
So there is always an element of curation in artmaking, which people are ignoring in this conversation about emergent technologies. The things that you pick up as inspiration rely on your personality, your memories, your geography, etc.
When people are working with AI, for example, the generated parts that get shared or pulled into a final work depend on the artist’s perspective and interests. It’s not as if they are not present. The artist’s hand is in whatever they do, every miniscule choice they make. I believe in the uniqueness of the lens. As long as we have humanity and individuality there will be artistry.
Furthermore, art always expands itself according to the technology that is available. When photography came around, people believed that it would be the death of painting. The average person in 1900 could not possibly have conceived of the work of video artists like Nam June Paik. I don’t think people realize that the first computer generated poems were written in the 1950s, that as long as we have had the ability to code we have been using it to create literature.
I personally think that it would be a shame for us to abandon our curiosity and desire to experiment because of a media frenzy about what we’re calling “AI”, which in reality is a set of technologies that doesn’t even come close to having the capabilities described in science fiction. Existing mediums are not diminished by the creation of new ones.
As for my own work, I see both my digital poems and my poetry tools as part of the legacy of early 20th century surrealist movements. I have a tool called the “Cut-up Machine” that mimics the methods of Burroughs and the Dadaists. I am interested in randomness, sense and nonsense.
And I am doing things that would be impossible to do without the use of code and the internet.”
*Mic Drop*
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Other freebies to check out:
Cliche-finder: Avoid cliches in your poetry by pasting your draft into this handy-dandy tool, it’ll highlight overused words and phrases.
“[Political] prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. -George Orwell, Politics and the English Language”Hemingway Editor: Highlights passive voice, complex sentences and adverbs in your writing.
PoetrySoup: A more communal tool, you can post on PoetrySoup and receive free constructive criticism from other poets, while offering your insights to others too.
Article Contributors:
Natalie Jane Edson is a queer poet and programmer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on the mind, the body, the mundane, and the practice of being alive. You can find out more about her work at nataliejaneedson.com.
Dr. Carly Schnitzler is the founder and co-director of If, Then and a lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins. Her teaching and research center on digital rhetoric, creative computation, and the public humanities. Drop her a line at cschnit1 [at] jh [dot] edu!
Amira Hanafi is a Poet and Artist. See more of Amira’s work at https://amirahanafi.com
F.M Papaz is a Greek-Australian creative and writer who believes that there is space at the literary table for everyone and is excitedly setting up your cutlery. Her poems have appeared in Mantissa Poetry Review, Literary Revelation’s Poetry Anthology ‘Hidden in Childhood’ and The Victorian Writer. In 2023, she joined Tabula Rasa Review as an Editorial Assistant & in 2024, she became a Marketing Intern at PSNY. Connect @fmpapaz or fmpapaz.com/ings to find her monthly newsletter about living a creative life.