Machine Dreams
Dispatch from NYC—on AI art and the future of poetry
Every time I visit New York City—where I am this week—I’m reminded that 1. I am an incurable introvert who loves wild, sparsely populated places, and 2. I love people.
In the midst of massive concrete and steel structures that organize millions of lives, it’s the small details that get me: The guy wearing Crayola yellow I-am-f-ing-done-with-the-pandemic pants walking his pit bull. Stray light from low clouds reflecting on the doorman’s cheekbones yesterday.
You know, people just … being people. But after we visited the MoMA, I couldn’t stop thinking about Unsupervised, a AI-generated installation by Refik Anadol that “uses artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art at MoMA.”
My daughter (a film student) and I stood in a small crowd transfixed by the giant, two-story display. An atmospheric soundtrack droned on as hi-def imagery undulated like magma. I couldn’t look away. Occasionally I thought I caught a glimpse of an original artwork in the morphing shapes.
“What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art?” the installation’s description asked.
“This is very controversial,” my daughter informed me.
No doubt, I thought. “Dream”? AI imitating the mind at its most poetic and mysterious?
What is “authentic”?
It got me thinking about how precipitous it feels to be an artist or writer right now. “Natural language processing tools driven by AI” are replacing living wordsmiths or, if not replacing, taking over the upfront research typically handled by writers preparing to write. Poetry? No problem. Chatbots will write a haiku or sonnet for you.
I agree with this MIT author that AI probably can’t write “authentic poetry.” “AI has no apparent path to inner experience, which I (and many others) take to be the ultimate source of authentic poetry.”
And I don’t think a “successful poem” is merely “compelling content with aesthetically pleasing wordplay, coupled with the various types of sound similarities and constraints of form,” as the MIT article suggests—nothing more than words arranged, like Unsupervised’s shapes and colors recapitulated.
These days, we are “moving too fast to experience what are, by nature, slow processes: sensations, feelings, intimations of thought,” says Jorie Graham, in this recent interview with Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. There’s a chasm between machines and the poet who, as Graham points out, “writes from one’s obsessions as they encounter one’s conditions.”
“Increasingly,” Graham warns, “as much as we think it is we who enter and engage the machine—retaining agency—it seems it is the machine entering us, diluting our capacity to undergo life as lived.”
“To feel less sad”
Long before AI entered the picture, Mark Rothko, a MoMA favorite of mine, cautioned against paintings created without emotion, noting the popular “notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted.”
Rothko wanted viewers to experience emotion through his paintings. “The fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions,” he said.
“You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me,” he said, “and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.”
Later my daughter and I sought out one of our favorite pieces, Frida Kahlo's Self Portrait With Cropped Hair. About the size of a large notebook, the painting shows Kahlo sitting in the middle of a room, scissors in hand, hair strewn all around her on the floor.
Lyrics from a song at the top of the painting suggest the reason for its making: “Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.”
In contrast, no emotion, no embodied POV was behind the display of Unsupervised. Any emotion we detected came from recycled representations of communicated emotion.
Maybe code is a kind of POV? Maybe. Human touch—the sense that the thing was made by a person with an intent to communicate, apparent even the oddest pieces in the MoMA’s collection—was lost in the dreaming machine.
“Yes, we all know technology’s gifts to us,” says Graham, "but how poisoned are these gifts? Because the primary function of much of this technology is to distract the soul from actual living. That’s its business model. It’s monetizing our distraction and destruction.”
Unsupervised’s dreaming machine was a feedback loop of sensation without emotion. We were stuck like flies in a web of data-driven sensory input.
“Of all that city I remember …”
Will my daughter’s generation resist digital distraction and seek out analog experience, finding vitality and meaning in meeting the world directly, with urgency? I hope so.
“Every time they try to crush attention, poetry’s task is to enhance or sharpen it,” says Graham. “Every time they try to dehumanize, whether politically or technologically, our task is to rehumanize—make the human yet more acute, poised, alert, ready to fight for its survival, breath by breath, word by word.”
My daughter sees the city as poetry: “I think of it as alive.” Walt Whitman did, too, of course.
Once I pass'd through a populous city imprinting my brain for
future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions.
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met
there who detain'd me for love of me …
“[The poet’s responsibility is] to joy in and record the astonishment—inner and outer,” Graham says. “When they dig our poems up out of the rubble, we want them to know who we were, what consciousness was, but also how astounding and unimaginably infinite and mysterious life was.”
Upcoming Events / Poet to Poet Community
The Poets Circle: Drop-in Conversations
MARCH: The Problem of Themes
March 1, 6-7pm MT & March 15, 12-1pm MT
Is a thematic approach to writing poetry helpful or harmful for your process? Should you consider themes prior to putting a book together? How do themes emerge and play out in your work? How do themes manifest in the works of others?
APRIL: Weaving the Thread—On Coherence
Apr 5, 6-7pm MT & Apr 19, 12-1pm MT
How do you cultivate coherence in your work? How do authors you admire create coherence in their work, across poems?
thank you for your words. there is a wonderful article in The Atlantic: "What Poets Know That ChatGPT Doesn’t," I recommend:
"ChatGPT cannot write poetry—or prose, for that matter—that is “the cry of its occasion,” as Wallace Stevens would have it, because there is no lived “occasion” other than the set of texts it can read. Neither can there be emotion recollected in tranquility. There’s no involuntary memory that’s stimulated by the taste of a madeleine. Creativity requires more than an internet-size syllabus or a lesson in syllables. So does essay writing, which is why, even though many acknowledge that ChatGPT can write passable high-school and undergraduate essays, I’m not concerned about that either.
The poems that ChatGPT writes are riddled with cliché and wince-worthy rhymes, but it isn’t just issues of quality that separate AI- and human-generated compositions. Poetry, whether in the style of Heaney or Dickinson or your journal from fourth grade, comes from the felt necessity to speak a truth, whatever kind of truth that might be, in a tongue that you’ve inherited or learned—or that has been imposed upon you by force or violence. That’s obvious to anyone who, for reasons they can’t fully explain, sits down and organizes their words into a pattern that’s slightly different from the language they use at the dinner table."
poems, after all, are fiery lines.
I enjoyed reading this special newsletter today. Mark Rothko keeps popping up in my readings this week.