"Can A Robot Ever Have The Heart Of A Poet?"
More AI/art discourse
I got to chat with Sasha-Ann Simons on her public radio show Reset to discuss my new chapbook and the role AI can play in art-making. You can also hear me read the poem “If Godzilla Was a Metaphor” from the book. The folks at Chicago Public Media wrote up a brief synopsis of the conversation that seemed relevant to share with you all, the people who want to think about poetry and its creation.
WHAT WE'VE GOT OUR EYE ON
Robbie Q. Telfer wanted to know what it would be like to work with an AI chatbot. The result is his new poetry chapbook called lonely line breaks: ChatRQT. We caught up with the Chicago writer to hear his takeaways and reflections on the process.
ChatGPT gets lots of facts wrong. Telfer started the project by asking the popular chatbot about himself, but it kept coming back with false narratives. Like that Robbie won the National Poetry Slam in 2008 (he didn’t. But he was a finalist in 2007). That he was born in 1968 (he’s an ’80s baby). That he wrote a poem about being a Black teenager in the suburbs (he hadn’t. And by the way, he’s a 40-something white man who lives in the city).
“If AI makes art, I don’t personally call that art.” In the end, Telfer wrote all the poems in his new collection, but the titles and prompts came from ChatGPT. Even if the bot had written some stanzas, in Telfer’s view, it wouldn’t be poetry. “There’s literally no blood pumping through it,” he says. “It’s cool. And it’s beautiful. Just like advertising can be beautiful, but it’s not art.”
AI can be a valid form of inspiration. “There are so many different pathways and doorways into the things we want to create,” Telfer says. For example, ChatGPT provided a prompt for his poem “Elephant in the Trees,” which, in Telfer’s hands, became a meditation on his grandmother. No Luddite, Telfer cited other examples of tech inspiring his work, like how he was able to connect with other poets on Zoom during the pandemic.
You can hear Robbie Telfer read from his work at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square on Aug. 3, at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston on Aug. 12 and at Quimby’s in Wicker Park on Aug. 17.
And you can listen to our full conversation with Telfer on artificial intelligence and poetry here.
It’s always nice to have a live microphone recording your unfiltered thoughts to really firm up what you think you believe in. But it still feels true: AI, on its own, cannot create art. If AI had spontaneously made the Mona Lisa in literally every detail, it would still be just kinda interesting.1
Someone at our last Zoom workshop said they didn’t see anything inspiring at all about ChatGPT. They called it a “random number generator but with words.” I see the validity of that point of view, even if it isn’t true for me personally. I have often found somewhat arbitrary limitations on creation to be very generative for me. I made a whole live literary show around that idea2. Some poets really like to let the poetic form they choose limit the words or ideas they get to write. Aubades are about dawn. Sestinas repeat six different words at the ends of each line. An iamb is a deeDOOT. That all sounds a little like computer coding to me, or chatbot prompts. I’m sure someone has tried writing a sonnet in binary (01 01 01 01 01/01 01 01 01 01 etc…).
But, in my mind, in order for it to be art, the programming must be fed through a meat computer to be consumed by other meat computers.
Are there exceptions? Probably! Like all genre definitions, when you start picking at the paint it chips off and gets lead dust everywhere and poisons your brain.
Apologies to Ms. Lisa for always being the hypothetical example representing all Art everywhere.
RIP The Encyclopedia Show.