Hello AI, it's me, Poet
Did you hear? People prefer AI poems to Walt Whitman.
As if our culture hasn’t felt off kilter enough lately, a new study shows that “non-experts” prefer AI poetry to human-generated poetry.
There are a gazillion reasons to ignore this idiotic study. I won’t go there, but I wanted to reshare this post I wrote after an actual AI-poetry evangelist infiltrated a poetry reading I gave last year.
Photo by Andrey Gulivanov on Unsplash
At a poetry reading I gave this week, hosted by the Colorado Poets Center, something happened that I’m sure is happening elsewhere. A guy stepped up to the podium during the open mic segment and said, “I ask you to consider: Who is the poet? Who is the creator?”
He then read a lengthy set of rhymed couplets spun out by an AI tool that he had fed a bunch of constraints. These included writing for the place (Boulder) and emulating Emily Dickinson, Shel Silverstein, and Langston Hughes, among other poets.
After he finished, several audience members voiced their disapproval and left. I couldn’t blame them. He probably thought he was posing a worthwhile question: Can AI produce a good poem—maybe even a better poem than a person—if given the right instructions?
Ingenuity, death, and the ineffable as cure
I had just read a poem called “Empire” from my first book, Bloodline, that mentions the fairy tale “The Nightingale.” The poem asks: “How often do we choose/ the radiantly jeweled thing/ with innards like a clock/ when what makes us tick/ is something plainer and stranger,/ something terribly elusive/ and infinitely joyful?”
You remember the story by Hans Christian Andersen? It was published in 1843, and like many fairy tales it still resonates.
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"Radha Marcum writes unflinchingly and with a rare synthesis of lyric and scientific intelligence, investigating just what it is to exist with consciousness now.” —Carol Moldaw, author of Beauty Refracted
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