second

I found the choice by Dan quite strong. I don’t agree with his personal usage of chatgpt, I think the approach of using these tools should be taken really carefully and critically. Not used at all would be the perfect choice. Maybe, reframing the relationship that we have as artists with this tools, if we look at them as we would look at a pencil, is the right answer. Maybe that’s the solution, that might disempower the usage of AI. People will naturally search for it, with curiosity and then stop using it after they served them creatively. Without loosing themself, becoming slaves, breeding data cows.

What are the *ੈ challenges that you are facing right now with the AI literary review and Trickhousepress, as a curator?

I found a couple of people online that commented on the AI literary review negatively, saying “look at where the world is going”, and getting it kinda personally, being very upset about it. And I understand it, although I have never had this for trickhouse press, which is also breaking the rules. I think the anger some people have doesn't come from not liking ai, rather than not liking what we are doing with it.

People are skeptical of it, they are right to be skeptical, because AI is going to change a lot of things. Some things are going to be worse, I get why some people don’t like it.

I do see the value in spaces like the AI Literary Review. I think these spaces can offer something important: more room for poets, artists, even just curious people, to come into contact with this technology. It’s an invitation to experimentation, and to open up conversations.

These spaces encourage people to investigate the tools more deeply, to look at what’s happening behind the curtain, to ask what artificial intelligence really means. Or at least, this is what I observed with the poets I talked with that published through the AI literary review.

Many of them seems not to use AI for convenience, they are using it as a mirror, a question, a disruption. Their work point to the question: where do we position ourselves, as poets and artists, when the concept of authorship begins to shift because of this black box technology called AI?

While writing my thesis, I tried to understand how come no one was talking about algorithimical poetry or, in a much more general sense, electronic literature.

I worked on a small zine , a little archive of historical and less historical projects, that involve literature and poetry on so many different levels.

Artificial intelligence isn't new. We've seen it in different forms for decades. People were engaging with algorithms in poetic ways long before OpenAI existed, long before the personal computer became mainstream.

Yet, no one is talking about electronic literature.

Electronic literature seems to exist as a niche within a niche. To me, it feels somewhat hidden. When I proposed, as an idea for next year’s poetry festival here in Rotterdam, during a brainstorming meeting at Poetry International, to involve artists and poets who engage with electronic literature, people looked at me a bit puzzled. I think many are aware that electronic poetry exists, but not really as poetry, more as artistic experiments. Perhaps the reality is that electronic literature has carved out a small space between literature and technology but never expected any recognition. Sometimes, the artists themselves don’t even consider themselves artists or poets.

Even if E-lit engaged and is still engaging with AI models, markov chains, automatisation, machine learning, to generate poetry in a much more critical way, because artists themself engage in working with the wires of technology, building their own tools, it seems still marginal to the literature discourse.

At the same time, I don’t think electronic literature has ever demanded a place into the traditional poetry publishing structure. Electronic literature built its own liminal space, between technology and literature, exactly to disrupt, but still to open up new perspectives on both worlds. Now, with tools like chatgpt becoming common, these boundaries are being tested again. What I am wondering is where a possible new type of poetry, like the one that sees AI as a collaborative tool for the poets, positions itself.

What's then the different, on a conceptual level, between the electronic poetry, made by artists/poets/authors, and the AI poetry that is included in the AI literary review project?

When it comes to electronic literature projects, some involve authors custom-building their own AI/ML models. Their creators aim to make a full artistic statement. In contrast, AI poetry projects, like those featured in the AI literary review, focus on the poetic text and the dynamic tension that arises when a human collaborates with a chatbot.

So the electronic literature approach emphasises on the whole process, starting from the conceptual design and internal development of the piece. While, AI poetry tends to focus on the input and output, often leaving the middle stages of the process less visible or understood. The magic of AI poetry often lies in the mystery behind the scenes, unknown to those who are not deeply involved with the tools already.
Electronic literature seeks to unravel these mysteries, while AI poetry raises questions about the tools themselves, as well as our human knowledge and philosophy.

Do you imagine that at some point this kind of experimentation will slip into what we call traditional publishing☼, or catch the attention of mainstream publishing houses and artistic spaces?

If that was going to happen we would kind of change people's expectations, cause at the moment ai is new, people are using it lazily to kind of write very bad poems.

I think a lot of publishers sort of put a blanket on it, on AI, they say no to it.

Probably because they have been inundated with terrible AI generated poems. What I wanted to do with the AI Literary review was document people's experiments. Partly, what I wanted to do was sort of change people's perception that AI generated poems are always bad, because if you use the tool kinda skilfully and thoughtfully you can do interesting things with it.

Still, it’s not possible to close your eyes, forget about the massive implications of these tools on everybody’s life. It is reactionary, yes, to use the tool to talk about the tool itself, but, as said, doing it skillfully. The data that tools like chatgpt are using is stolen, but remixed so hard it’s impossible to get back to the original source.

When you then use those tools are you participating in that same theft? What if you are part of that data soup that gets back rewarmed in your plate, are you stealing from yourself?

*:･ Have you ever thought about building your own model?

That’s a bit beyond me, coding is a bit mysterious to me. But there are many people doing it, and really complicating the question about authorship.

If you build a model and the model is writing poems that are very unique.

You could argue that the model is a work of literature, code, there is a rhythmic aspect to it, in that case the person writing the code is the author of the program, but then what is the model doing? Is the model assembling from the data it got available. So it is kinda like an author within an author.

I think one of the real problems with authorship is the fact that no one came up with words, or sentence structures, like everything you say is borrowed, not referenced, you cannot speak without plagiarism.

On a small sentence by sentence or word by word level, everyone is plagiarism all the time, but we wouldn’t say that , because that would be very unreasonable. But at some point if you do enough sentences and you haven't attributed them to someone, then plagiarism comes.

There is no clear playermark in which pont plagiarism happens.

My belief, that people might not agree with, is that you can’t plagiarise language. It is a communal thing. It is a team effort. No one should claim to be the author of anything, all ideas and words are borrowed. No one owns any experience, what we are doing is just making our own arrangements. Kinda like when you are on the beach, and you see some shells and pebbles, you pick them up and put them in a circle, you are the one that has done that, but you are not the one that originally came up with the idea of making circles of shells.
You are making a contribution to the overall structure of the beach, or you are making a contribution to the overall knowledge of the human race.

To claim that you are an author it’s individualistic and maybe a product of capitalism, and might in a way do more harm than good.

But obviously people like to be compensated for their work, they need to be able to say “this piece of writing is mine”.

Maybe authorship more than anything else, a practicality. It is something we do to keep society running, but it is not something that really exists.

I am not sure for me it is just about compensation.
I want to be seen, this is mine, I feel this is a much rooted behaviour at the core of our human spirit, it is not necessary something that comes just from capitalism (or is it?).

I want the prize, I want the glory, the acknowledgement I am creative, I want a “bravo”. Is it just egoism and self centrism talking? The individualistic brain?

At the same time I wonder if losing the boundaries of authorship, and the copyright laws that bloomed around it, might mean a shift of power, a shift of power that might be unfortunate for authors themselves. I mean, that is already happening.

If language is a communal thing, and no one owns anything, then openAI is right in doing what they are doing. Obviously that is not the case, what I fear is forgetting about the fact that losing authorship doesn’t mean losing responsibility. I am sure on a creative level, and activism level, experimenting with authorship can be useful, to bring light to some major issues around us, but if the solution is letting then corporation use your data, that you don’t feel it’s important to own, because language is not owner by anybody, then it is a free pass for those corporation to exploit it, while you might lose the already small platform left for creativity.

If they then use your work, building a tool, that is then normalised, that becomes just creepy, just knowing they will ask you money for a tool that was built on the rubble of your work, asking you to produce more to alimentate their tools, to make more money

Where are, then, the boundaries?

Some artists may find copyright infringements acceptable, using tools like chatgpt, because they feel that change is coming in a way or another. Artists often rely on copyright as their primary protection, even when the system frequently fails them anyway. The art and creative industries are increasingly being defunded and privatised, leaving artists struggling. As a writer and poet, do you think in the future copyright will still matter if the concept of ownership itself shifts? Could it be because of a societal desire to escape hyperindividualism and by a growing awareness of how corporations exploit data?

It seems to me people want to dissolve, to give out agency. Are we too tired?

But we live in a society where individual identity is everything. Are we searching for a steady companion? A steady companion that won’t reclaim his authorship, that will let us shine clapping for us? Is that loneliness?

I think if you bring the computer into the process you risk diluting the sense of humanness in your poems, you risk putting your intentions and feelings on the side and replacing them with something else. So when I use an AI tool in writing, I try to find a balance.

I want the tool to help generate useful material without sacrificing the personal concerns and ideas I care about, the ones I want to express in a poem.

That’s also what I look for when reading submissions for the literary review. I want to read work that feels like it truly comes from the person who submitted it, something that doesn’t feel impersonal or overly computerised.

Aren’t we all, constantly, trying not to be diluted?
Trying not to watch our humanness disappear, shredded into a million pixels?

The boundaries between us and technology have never been fixed, now we are foreseen what the future could look like.

As AI is built on our stolen data, is working with AI then as working with our own reflection on the mirror? If we are working with ourself, then, why people don’t say out loud they are using AI to write their own papers, texts, mails, art pieces, messages to their loved ones?

These tools have started to be used massively, many ｡°✩ writers probably use them without saying it, or anyway they are not open about the matter(?)

Yeah, sure, people will judge you for it. You don’t want to be seen as cheating, or being dishonest. Many ai tools are writing tools, so I guess people are giving it a go, they are curious. But still people feel they need to hide it, which is a shame. If you are very honest about it, that should be ok. I feel in years time it will be the norm, so people won’t be judged.
In that case the ai literary review won’t be considered something different from the norm. It would have served its purpose, becoming no different from any other literary magazine.
It would be niche if it didn’t feel like it needed its own niche, separate section of poetry.

The risk of drawing a line, and saying “this is ai poetry” would make it harder for it to sort of be side by side with traditional poetry. But I also think that if there wasn’t this space carved it would either not be published at all, or it would get published under the guise of being completely human made, and people would pretend there was no ai involvement in it.

I guess putting a label on it, putting it out in the open is doing something to normalise it.

AI is a concept in evolution.

Artificial intelligence is often used as a catch-all term. What AI actually refers to is a broad spectrum of systems with many different capabilities. Most of what we call AI today falls under the narrow AI (ANI) or weak AI bubble. These systems are excellent in specific tasks, such as language processing or image recognition. While they might appear to understand, they still lack true reasoning or self awareness. They do it because we ourselves don’t know what reasoning and self awareness means. Neither intelligence.

The media often likes to play instead with the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the sentient machine of science fiction, the AI that matches and surpasses human intelligence. AGI remains purely theoretical.

The AI trend is slowing down, is not novel anymore. The uncanny that was perceived at the beginning of the trend, is not interesting anymore from the writer and reader, because it has been seen already.

As said, artificial intelligence is not a novel concept. Algorithmical poetry that uses computational processes to generate poetry from built databases is not novel either.

What’s new is having general access to a massime artificial intelligence scraper chatbot machine, still based on corporations' extractive cloud business models. What is new is looking at the chatbot as a person, saying hello and thank you to the bot.

That’s fragile, and beautiful in its own human way, then you remember that saying thanks to the bot won’t save you. A massive AI chatbot that sounds like a sweet lovely muse, and your perfect fan.

Warhol would have loved this.

Do you perceive chatbots powered by AI as the new muses? Did your mind change with time while you were studying this matter for your phD? Do you regret your stance?

I’m not so convinced that AI could be a muse these days. I think it could go to the way that makes it act as a muse, so what I am doing is just ask the AI to draft a poem, I give it a couple of fine tuning prompt, like “don’t use fake words”, “don’t try to explain what is happening in the poem”, that sort of things. It’s less like a provider of inspiration, it gives you material that then you can “muse” with. So it gives you sort of, I guess, inspiration, stuff you can work with.

What I find interesting is the process that brought a human to ask to the machine through prompt to get material, but then in the muse system, so the desire from the human to get inspiration, but just enough, not too much, you get the opposite process: the machine is giving prompt to the creative human mind that the mind work with, elaborate, as we are the machine, in this game of who is the real machine at the end?

It does the drafting, which years ago I was feeling was really convenient. It means I can write poems quickly and I don’t need to wait for inspiration, because I can get the inspirational demand, and these days I feel more like actually that that takes out the fun a little bit.

As a society we see leisure and labour as two different things, yet we cannot stand to lose time in favour of our own pleasure, if it doesn’t serve to produce. Still, we constantly try to find ways to merge the two, finding methods to be productive while resting, having fun, or even sleeping.

When poetry, which in contemporary society is often viewed as a pleasure act of self expression and creativity, is combined with AI, it feels to me like this approach turns creativity into just another form of production.

There are countless YouTube videos promising to help you overcome creative blocks, but the anxiety they generate reveals something important: when creativity is stripped of spontaneity and reduced to a task or obligation, it becomes labour rather than art. Is that what a possible automatisation of poetry, in a dystopian future, might look like?

And also I find the drafts that the AI gives me quite similar, and I end up writing down very similar poems. So, now, I am surprising myself less.

It’s a mixed blessing, it's definitely reliable in its speed, no matter what you say to it, and you work with the draft and do something good. But it is less organic and it doesn’t feel as good.

And if it doesn’t feel as good then it is not as fun to write with, and it is not going to have much magic, as opposed to a normal poem.

Also as a muse, if our scope is to get material to work with, we can work with anything in the same way.

Like, things you see, walking downtown, the whole world is kind of a muse. In that sense, so to that end, what is AI bringing to the table that the rest of the world isn’t?

I fear the answer is its placebo effect, as a sweet sedative. .⋆

I think it is definitely bringing something, but in terms of it being a muse, it’s probably not [AI] main advantage that it has to writers.

What is the advantage then?

Maybe the advantage is finding ourselves wondering about why we are using AI in the first place.

In the most hypocritical stance, I was heavily using AI while starting my master, XPUB. How do you think you would ever grasp on any computational concept from a completely different background? I didn’t even know how to switch on a computer.

That’s no excuse, isn’t it?

I had already erased from my system, on a deep intimate level, the possibility of asking others for help. Because of a broader education system where I was flourishing, seeking support became a taboo, because of my upbringing.

When my master’s tutors asked if anybody had any question I always kept silent, as I refused to acknowledge they were sincere, that I was in need and that probably, everything was too challenging, that maybe that path I chose wasn’t for me.

It was for debugging before, then explaining computational concepts, then summaries, then for psychological support. After a while I had millions of conversations open with chatgpt. I didn’t even read the answers anymore. Half of the world water surface has probably evaporated because of me.

You tell yourself they’re saved, archived. You could always come back to them later. But of course, you never do. It's like piling up websites' bookmarks, or saving images on pinterest, or creating curated Instagram albums. That's compulsive archiving. That's just trying to have control over the flood of information your brain cannot fathom.

Is there anybody already studying virtual hoarding?

So I turned to my sweet chatbot friend. I fed him drafts, and then its own draft. When I started my internship at Poetry International, and I had to write mails constantly, the situation didn’t change.

At some point my internship supervisor told me I could safely be much more informal in my email exchanges, less stiff. Then, I realised the situation. Obviously chatgpt simulates your own voice, it is just a mirror. It was spitting my own rigidity back at me. I stopped using it to write mails.

After that, my workload increased like crazy. I realised how much writing an email with chatgpt was resulting in me wasting much more time than I assumed. When I started sending emails in bursts without even the chance to have the time to feel insecure, then I saw how much I didn't need to use it. It didn’t help me at all.

The use of AI chatbots such as chatgpt is empowered by insecurities, a lack of individual and structural support, and a society that drives us to exhaustion. When companies capitalise on natural vulnerabilities of the human experience, what began as a tool easily turns into an addiction. It's just that easy, we see that.

With Gabriela I was talking exactly about this.

I don't know if you read... Joseph Fasano the poet, I really like one of his poems "For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper", I like his phrasing, "what you are so afraid of, the miraculous task of it?",
"What are you trying to avoid?"

Right now I am looking at my hand, mid air. It's trembling because of all the caffeine I ingested today. I am still battling myself. I'm still working on the balance between passion and obsession, between working and resting. Accepting the process, the wait, the patience.

⊹ ⁺ Sometimes AI is called a collective voice. If we understand AI as a form of collective authorship (that is owned by no one and everyone, even if it is still based on extractive cloud business models from corporations), what does that mean to the poems it generates? And poets and writers as individual ⊹ ݁ ˖ ࣭ creatives?

It's really difficult to speculate about what the future will look like. I feel there will be a natural lag. So, people that have done it a certain way will probably continue to do it a certain way. But thinking about the younger generation... I am not sure about how many of them will like to write themselves. When I think about the amount of things that I, in my lifetime, have automated. So many things. The idea of writing manuscripts to me sounds impossible, memorising entire epic poems to orally narrate… all these kinds of things that were manual… I don't know what will become antiquated in the future. Maybe someone will feel it was crazy to read books, or think, from scratch…

Our generation already had a relationship with the past and with innovation, there could be some kind of retro turn back, a nostalgia, a niche, a trend.

I want to continue to write. The idea to automate my own poetry, choosing to have AI for the rest of my life writing for me, seems really dissatisfying. The reason that most people write poetry is not for monetary gain or fame. Poetry is the least lucrative art form of all.

If I use chatgpt when I am exhausted maybe the point is to understand just why I got to that point in the first place. Why did everybody get to that in the first place?

︶⊹︶︶୨୧︶︶⊹︶

Gabriela Milkova Robins is a Macedonian poet and SGSAH-funded PhD researcher in the School of English based in Scotland.

Her poem “Yield” is featured in the fourth issue of the AI literary review.

How did you find out about the AI literary review?

I found it through Instagram. I saw Dan's post about the previous issue of the AI literary review. I was really intrigued, because I didn't actually understand what that meant. So I read the past issues, and what I liked about it is that specifically the goal of the AI literary review is human poets. It's specifically not about just AI-created work. Which, I think, it seems to me he had some problem with defining exactly what AI creative work, or aided work is. I saw he updated the criteria to apply to the issue.

It's about humans in conversations with these tools. It's interesting because, when I submitted my work I actually never even thought about doing this till I saw the project. So I wrote a poem specifically for them.

This was my second interview, I wasn’t trembling as a leaf anymore.

⊹ ݁ ˖ How important is it for you to experiment within your practice? How come you choose to work with chatgpt for your poem, "Yield"? ₊˚ෆˎˊ˗

I love experimentation in my practice, it was a new way to involve experimental practices in my poetry. I love to work with any elements, from different sources, whether it be music or visual art, sound, concrete poetry, or visual poetry. [The AI literary review] seems quite an interesting project, it brings together many different tools, so I was immediately intrigued. Reading the past issues to see how people had used AI to come up with their work and it seems to be really variable and innovative.

The way I did it was almost completely random in my mind. For some reason I really loved this image of the bath bomb dissolving in a bathtub. I showed it to chatgpt. It wrote a poem called "Effervescence" and it really wasn't very good.

I just thought, ok, this is not great, but I liked a few images, the colors, the dissolution, the bubbling, so I thought it would be better to combine it with one of my previous poems <name>. This was one of the poems I didn't really like myself, so I didn't do much with it. It was called <>. It was kind of a solitary, seasonal, playful poem. It was fun. So for some reason it evokes the images, colors, the melding of the colors. I asked chatgpt to combine the two poems. When it came up with the response, I preferred a lot more those associations that came from that, and then kept what I liked, edited some things, and came up with the published poem.

I found it really interesting, I enjoyed the process.

Who is the author of Yield? ⋆.˚ Would you consider yourself the sole author, or could AI as well be considered a collaborator in its creative process? Do you own Yield as a poem? ⋆.˚

For this poem, I'd definitely say collaborator. I think there are variations in which you can use the AI, a spectrum, so people have a choice.

A lot of the phrasing in Yield came from chatgpt, and then a lot of phrasing is mine. So, I would say, it was 60% from me, 40% from AI, in terms of phrasing specifically. Then, I was the editor.

Was it the first time you approached chatgpt ˚₊‧꒰ to create a poem?
Did your approach to AI change after your involvement in the AI literary review? ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

Yes, it was the instigator.
I didn't even think of it as a possibility before.

I have not quite understood yet, especially AI is evolving so quickly that I haven't even thought that it was capable of writing any poetry before. I think two years ago it wasn't doing a great job. Now I realise that it has really evolved, and it can write some poetry, still some mediocre poems. Poetry seems the hardest for AI to get, and the easiest for people to tell if a poem is AI generated. But I was surprised that it seemed to be learning from me, so the more poems I was showing, the more I preferred what it was coming up with as well.

It does learn on the spot and it can very quickly figure out who you are, what you like, and I find that interesting and terrifying.

Some poets have gone public entirely, because they refuse to allow Meta to use their poetry to train AI, which is effectively what I have done with chatgpt by myself, I was training it to write like me. It definitely made me consider how advanced it has become, how quickly it is learning.

I do believe it is going to basically be indistinguishable, and quickly, in the next few years, to be able to write incredible poetry. It's not making me reconsider my relationship with AI specifically, but what will it mean to be a human creating, and how can you prove that it is your work as well.

AI is seeping through anything, its usage being advertised everywhere. I always believed that in a way art is something over our societal structures, Creativity comes from within. At the same time we are the living sons of pop culture, or hyper capitalism, what did we expect? Art has been a commodity from ages. It seems just the natural course of things, to extend this desidere for automatisation to everything, everything that lets us feel alive, because we are tired, exhausted.

How many people are going to use AI to become a poet? Even in the AI literary review, if you ask people to not submit poetry generated just with AI, you're just going off the honesty and integrity of the people, but will never know for sure.

How do you think AI is reshaping the idea of authorship? ⋆˚࿔

That's the thing, as I said it's going to be very difficult to prove what is created by a human mind and what is from AI. Performance, maybe, we will need performers.

Performance in poetry might become more prominent rather than text, because people will connect with a specific performer. But, I think it's just going to be a case of trust. Trust in the individual.

I think we will always value what is human-made and made through effort. Some sort of effort has gone into it rather than just the clickable button.

We do value the time that is going through something. There will be a drive for human-made poetry, but as to how to decide on what we believe is human and what AI, is going to be very difficult. It is becoming an issue everywhere, including academia. Right now I am doing a PhD, I don't think AI is very far from also being able to write my PhD entirely.

Which then begs the question of what is the point? And whether the point of art, creating, writing, might just become for our personal benefit rather than our glory.

It might be for just our own satisfaction, because I do think humans do enjoy the work they might have put effort in making, they enjoy the satisfaction in what they have done. A lot of the satisfaction will come just from knowing "I wrote it, I did it, I enjoyed it." If authorship becomes more of a contentious idea we might have to turn more inward, and find the value in art and writing, and each of our personal endeavours.

This tension between performativity and individuality feels like one of the central knots in this whole conversation. What Gabriela described, that AI gives us more time to be creative and to look inward, is something talked about by many people that are in favour of AI.

But that’s not what’s happening. Because our society isn’t built like that. It’s built on inequalities, on structural imbalances that don’t just disappear when a new tool arrives.

The idea that everyone will suddenly have time to be creative is not just naïve, it’s unsustainable. Our systems still depend on someone constantly doing invisible labour. And right now, that someone is us, the users. The so called “free time” we’re being offered is often just more time spent producing data, refining prompts, correcting outputs, and feeding them back to the system.

Society needs slaves, and AI needs them too. We’re being positioned as those slaves. It doesn’t seem like AI is helping much with those inequalities, because AI is a mirror.

It has biases. Because it’s built on the internet, and the internet was built over decades through the corporates’ games, cultural hegemony, and systemic exclusion.

Saying that performativity will be the new beauty of poetry and literature feels fragile to me. Firstly, because performance is indeed already part of our lives.

Social media gives priority to performativity.

We are constantly being asked to be performative in every aspect of ourselves: our work, our appearance, our opinions, even our grief. This constant self display becomes a kind of performance we follow in order to stay visible, to stay relevant. We’re not just writing or creating anymore, we’re selling ourselves.

Knowing that it is now difficult to understand if the person you are seeing on screen is real, then digital performativity might not be the solution.

AI doesn’t seem to have any problem at fabricating extremely realistic videos of performances anymore. It doesn’t need humans to do so. It can imitate vulnerability, style, even poetic urgency. And if digital performativity is our only metric for value, AI can do that just as well, maybe better.

I still feel in real person performance will be important, as Gabriela said.

But this might mean we will find ourselves constantly fighting to keep our voices ours, to keep technology out of that space. And that could lead to an increasingly black and white division: human vs. machine, embodied vs artificial, authentic vs simulated. Where the real battle might be ourself vs our own societal system supported by corporations.

That’s a troubling place to end up, where nuances disappear and every act of creation and art becomes a kind of resistance.

What if, as a poet and artist, I don’t want my piece of art to be a piece of resistance? What is the true reason people write poetry?

What is your reason to write poetry?

I go out of satisfaction. It's therapeutic, it's creative, it's playful. As I heard from many other poets, the only reason you want to share it is because people will inevitably connect with you, they will get inspired, and want to write as well. Satisfaction too, to listen, the joy of beauty. Seeing someone else seeing the effort.

I do hope that people will keep having the drive to create.

There is always a discourse around connection around poetry. People like to write poetry not just for themself, but for everybody. Isn’t then a future where poetry will be just done for ourself as individual creatives, a dystopian one? Aren’t we social creatures?

Do you feel language is a communal human experience?

Definitely. Of course we have all different ways of communicating in different ways that certain forms of language will communicate with us. It is one of the first things we learn, there's a lot of joy in it. I have a one-and-a-half-year-old at home who is just learning how to speak, and he is teaching me a lot in general about language and communication and how much joy it can bring, learning. To think that we all went through that, the joy of language, signs, making sense of the world around us. It is a very communal experience.

It is not chaotic, it has such an order and sense to it.

Language is something that goes hand in hand with society, and culture.

AI is seeping already through language, that itself is not weird at all, language is not static. At the same time, Language being shaped by AI is not just about that, it is about how it will use our own biases to keep people at the margin. How would poets and artists reposition themself because of this?

How could poets reposition themselves in society?₊ ⊹ Would₊ ⊹you like to reposition yourself in society? Are you doing it already?

Well, I used to say, the first jobs due to AI will be the programming ones.

A lot of the STEM practices. But, I believed AI was not going to be able to create art.

I don't know why I believed that. What I believed was that our careers are going to be indispensable in the future. As for now, the future… I think poetry and art will always have a place in human values and affection. They have been the main ways to pass down our history. Mythology, ancient texts, Gilgamesh, the Bible…

For the future it will be just a matter of retaining that and I do have faith that we will because it has been innovations that we have had for so many eras in humanity. Almost every age thinks this is it, this is the end of everything. They even talk about it in old apocalyptic scripts and texts, they say clearly this is revelation, clearly the world is ending. So, I am trying not to be too pessimistic because the value in poetry is going to have to be found in what it can provide both to the writer and the reader.

It should be a two-way system. I do hope and believe humans will have a role in that, but maybe our AI counterpart will also participate.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖

°✩₊ We all live in a constant state of sensory overload, struggling to breath into an endless stream of content.
Do you think AI poetry is another product of our contemporary condition?

Absolutely.
At the very least, it’s an honest product too.
The idea that AI is about to happen — that it is going to change everything — is hilarious to me because I feel like it’s already taking place in ways that are so ubiquitous that we can’t see the wood for the trees.
A good case in point is the sensory overload you mention there
— the endless stream of content which is delivered to us by algorithms not only controlled by artificial intelligence but by algorithms that are made up of an ever-increasing degree of AI-generated content. It is simply the case that no one likes to believe that what they’re consuming right now is the work of AI.

the dead internet theory is one of the most interesting phenomena happening right now.

This theory suggests that much of what we see online today isn’t created by humans but by bots, scripts, and AI generated content. According to this theory, a significant portion of the internet’s activity is fake, designed to simulate human interactions, while lacking true human intent. This theory raises questions about authenticity, creativity, and the nature of the digital world.

The rise of AI made poetry become quite intriguing in this context. Is poetry contributing to the killing of the internet, where authentic human voices are drowned into an abyss of algorithmical waste?

And no one likes to believe that the same algorithms that deliver an endless stream of AI-generated content across our screens knows what you’ll like today, and can predict with terrifying accuracy what you’ll like next week. This is seductive, and produces the effect of what I’ve called astral ambedo. I use the word seductive here in the Baudrillardian sense but that’s just blatant intellectual cope for what is libidinously seductive, since my algorithm so-often descends into pretty e-girls doing cute dances.
Of course, we’re suppose to feel outrage over all of this, all of the time, but — like so much of the outrage in this world — the outrage is, in the end, performative.

I can tell it’s performative because I’ve never seen so many people who never really enjoyed art or poetry get so upset at machines for creating art and poetry. What’s really fascinating however, is the way that all of this AI-generated content — all of the socio-algorithmic manipulation that results from the use of artificial intelligence — is an affront to something ineffable.

I'm quite impressed about the fact that performativity, while talking about AI and poetry, is something recurrent.
When Gabriela explained that, for her, performativity might be a way to save poetry from the doom of automation, I knew this might have meant two things: approach performativity as a saviour approach, to still keeping some relevance, or a disrupt approach, to make fun of the performance itself.

One of the most intriguing, even amusing, aspects is the thought that the entire outrage against AI generated poetry could itself be generated by AI. It feels like we're merely spectators.

How central is human agency
in defining what art or poetry is for you?

The question you present here is interesting to me because it falls into that vein of philosophical thinking that tries to decentralise human agency, to push it beyond even the periphery.
In my experience, I have found thinking beyond the human is often considered politically heretical because it’s like you’re supposed to — even in the most theoretical considerations — prioritise the wants and needs of human beings. It’s ironic in the sense that you can still undermine the collective social bonds of our hyper individualism in thinking theoretically beyond the human. I suspect this kind of thinking throws a hammer into the cogs of a society constantly having to be reminded that we’re all individuals, together, remember? It seems platitudinal to even mention that we have a tendency, as a species, to place ourselves at the centre of things, prioritising our own wants and needs as a collective to the detriment of — say — the natural biodiversity of the planet. Contrary to that dominant worldview, I love to imagine a universe that doesn’t place human agency at the centre of things.

Yes, this is the one knot I was searching for.

I believe many have studied about that pivotal moment when we shifted, as a western society, from being at the center of the universe as God's creations, to being just creatures in the universe, an enlightened one, center less.
I wonder if the rise of AI, its challenge to traditional notions of ownership and authorship, is part of a new kind of Galilean rupture. Perhaps this is another turning point, one where we are once again searching for a decentring, not by the nature of the cosmo this time, but by the tools we've built.

I have certainly benefited from thinking realistically
about the limitations of human agency — and I am trying more than ever to care about human concerns — even though my thinking, and therefore my poetry, is often predicated on questions that seek to break from the strictly ‘human’. In many ways I’m interested in centring human agency in my poetry only so that I might consider what the world might look like without it. One of my favourite poets is Georg Trakl because his poetry seems to deal with human agency in relation to the great cosmic indifference of the world. I say in relation to and not ‘in conversation with’ or even ‘in opposition to’ because I feel like it’s not even a case of us attempting to go beyond it, but rather it is beyond us.

°✩₊ You mentioned that AI isn’t great at producing creativity as we know it. But creativity has always been defined by human production. Isn’t it possible that we’re going through a cultural shift right now, that could see humanity embrace the "artificial ghost" as a legitimate author? If we are, as you described, living in a “hypereschatological condition” What I am referring to, with this question, is an article written by Alex, "Getting #Lainpilled: Towards a Definition of the (Hyper)Eschatological Condition", published on the Baudrillard Now , isn’t it possible that a new normal will emerge?

Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition began, in part, as a reaction to artificial intelligence allegedly writing poetry.

I was interested in producing a counter-poetics that machines couldn’t simply reproduce. It was ironic that this poetry collection ended up as a singular fusion of formal poetry and ascii art because the latter is often associated with the rich history of creative computing. In many ways, the formal poems were included in that collection to demonstrate my ability to write according to tradition whilst ultimately wanting to do something that hadn’t been done before in poetry.

I say ironic here because it seems endlessly funny to me that Large Language Models struggle to interpret simple, text-based visual art, initially designed with the limitations of machines in mind. Consequently, the ascii characters, sitting adjacent to text-based art forms, seemed like the ideal foundation for a poetics that could sit antagonistically to what machines were capable of producing, and perhaps more importantly, what machines were capable of interpreting.

What a machine is able to interpret about the world is way more interesting to me than what a machine can produce. So whilst people were discussing the extraordinary capabilities of Chatgpt on release, I was more interested, at the time, in revealing what those Large Language Models actually lacked — not because I think they’re no good but because I actually respect the technology too much to mindlessly accept its alleged capabilities. What I discovered through using text-based visuals in relation to LLMs was a vulnerability in terms of what those machines were actually capable of interpreting. They remain, to me, at least, incapable of operating at any serious level of nuanced interpretation which makes them creatively weak as opposed to creatively strong. I think before we can produce creatively we have to interpret creatively, and that power of creative interpretation, as it stands, is what AI currently lacks in my opinion.

A lot of this is made apparent in playing around with the technology on offer to us, which is all great if you’re emailing in a pinch, but not so good if you’re out there trying to write a great novel. I always liked that meme where Fred from the Scooby-Doo gang pulls off the mask of the monster — represented, in this instance, by ChatGPT — only to find Microsoft Clippy. Likewise, it appears to me that LLMs are merely another neoliberal means of optimising productivity;

If we are culturally at the edge of a precipice, eschatologically speaking, then it's not a surprise if the boundaries of authorship, authenticity, and creative labour are being brought into question. In this specific context AI becomes less of a tool and more a sign of the times.

The publication by Alex, Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition, is fascinating as a deliberate counter practice. It's made from a refusal to let the machine fully decipher the language it uses. When I hear about ASCII my eyes sparkle. Knowing that ASCII functions as a kind of poetic encryption, that resists machine interpretation, makes me incredibly happy.

Language learning models don't have an interpretive core. They can mimic, but they cannot digest or absorb anything. I really appreciate Alex’s mindset, surely his observation that much of the discourse around AI is soaked in nostalgia and often, pointless fear.

When I think about the word ghost that as I used it in my question, I realise that part of its wonder is rooted in the mystery that AI still have for many, included me. It’s intangible. There’s an aura around it. That aura invites us to project something mystical onto it. But we shouldn’t be tricked by our own human fancy for the sublime. AI is built from familiar patterns. Its advertised power is productivity, but its true mystical force is control.

If Baudrillard was correct when he said the end of our world had, in fact, already happened then the hypereschatological condition is that purgatory in which we continue to wait for our final judgement as a species. It is, in this way, not quite done with us yet — perhaps more ubiquitous now than ever. Perhaps the afterlife of planet Earth will be defined by all the artificial intelligence we’ll have left behind. Certainly, the final irony of our existence would be a utopia on planet earth that didn’t include us.

What I find most fascinating about poetry as an art form is its indefinability.
To be clear, I don’t believe art can ever truly be defined. Art constantly escapes any fixed definition. And yet, poetry feels even more impalpable.
Poetry speaks from a place you know exists, but feel you cannot see, as if it were speaking from the clouds above you or the ground beneath your feet.

Hilma af Klint, Group IX/, The swan, no 1

Some time ago, I wrote a short essay on poetry as liminal.
“You’ve been walking for a long time, unable to see where you started or where you're heading, and then, suddenly, you become aware of it”.

I’m stealing my own words here to describe the feeling of liminality: the sensation of floating in transition.

Poetry, to me, is a liminal language. It finds energy in the pauses between words, in the silence beyond the lines, beyond any structured form, beyond absence itself. It was then natural to ask if this nature of poetry was seen by others too, and if this same nature would influence how we perceive poetry into the AI context.

Do you see AI poetry as liminal?

This is a fantastic question.
I have written about liminality a lot and have started to argue that the ideological function of liminal space is to suggest the existence of an outside. What the liminal offers is never truly exterior or in-between but rather acts as the shadow-double of an emptiness inherent to the inside; a corridor leading back to the only realism it wants us to know. Perhaps this is why such spaces, caught at the right time of day, take on a uniquely sinister quality. To say, liminality is rarely neutral, and so the simulation of the outside that these spaces conjure is often — if not always — a collection of things already known to us. In this way the liminal is tethered to the familiar, seducing not through genuine departure but through the promise of return.

It has been suggested many times elsewhere that today’s realism exerts its hold not by resisting opposition but by subsuming it entirely. This subsumptive quality has been perfected to the extent that even the concept of absence — of in-betweenness — of our realism going beyond itself has been fully-integrated, reconstituted into the controlled aesthetic experience we call the liminal.

So to answer your question — yes. AI poetry is, by this definition, liminal because AI Poetry hints towards an outside, of an attempt to go beyond what is already known about poetics, even if that appeal to a world beyond brings us back to what we already know. In this way, AI poetry only plays at alterity.

°✩₊ You’ve submitted two poems to the AI Literary Review. What were the differences (conceptual, technical, emotional) that led to the creation of All Secret Endings and $TARDEW_VA::EY_GUN_
MOD.EXE:? Do they represent an evolution in your practice with poetry, and AI?

As of right now, I’ve actually submitted three poems to the AI Literary Review. Two have been published there. All Secret Endings was published in Issue One, and the poem, Wii Sports Coloured Icee, was published in Issue Four whilst $TARDEW_VA::EY_GUN_MOD.EXE was rejected by the editorial on the basis of it pushing the boundaries of what a poem is a little too far. In my mind, its rejection only affirmed its success: to exceed the genre meant to be excluded from it. In many ways this only confirms what I said regarding the liminality of AI poetry as a means of bringing us back to a recognisable poetics. That’s not a criticism of the AI Literary Review — that’s just how it is sometimes.
poems here - poems

A recognisable poetics

My favourite of the three poems is perhaps Wii Sports Coloured Icee because I think it achieves a nice synthesis between the AI-generated content and a poetic voice I enjoyed channeling. That poem represents a place where my work with AI has landed most comfortably, and is certainly representative of an evolution in my practice with poetry, and AI. I suppose if AI Poetry is about achieving a synthesis between AI and human intelligence then perhaps this poem is an even better example of AI poetry than All Secret Endings — but that’s more dependant on what you think AI Poetry should be.

Are you the author of your work? Are you collaborating with the AI tools, and algorithms, that are involved in the generation of the text you are using? Do you own the result of their process?

Does Bob Ross own your painting if he taught you how to paint on YouTube? What about Hobbycraft, just because they sold you the paint?

I wish I had a more provocative answer, but I feel like all art can be reduced to the loneliness of the author — alone someplace, aching for a connection to something transcendental. There was once this idea that technology resembles magic, but maybe really powerful technology just resembles sentience.
Certainly, these tools look so powerful to us that there is a tendency across all the fields of artificial intelligence to mythologize, but ultimately AI is just another sophisticated tool — no more and no less than a paintbrush was to Rembrandt, or a piano to Chopin. I wish it were more complicated than that. But I don’t think it is.
Of course, AI isn’t passive. It throws things back at you, sometimes strange, sometimes stupid, sometimes sublime. But so does paint if you work with it long enough. So does music. You shape the thing, and in that shaping, the authorship is yours.

At the same time, while I can respect that choice, it doesn’t change the reality that, while some people may choose to step away from authorship, others may be forced to do so, by the fact their authorship won't allow them to make a living. I know, I know people will say that that's how things work, and I guess we are all just waiting to be the next.