On AI Generated Poetry

Let me begin by saying that my attitude towards artificial intelligence is more of excitement than trepidation. The wide ranging possibilities it has for streamlining processes and democratizing knowledge could define the 21st century, and make progress accelerate at a pace never before seen. As far as my day job is concerned, I can already think of so many ways in which it would make my peers and I far more efficient without overloading us and burning us out. It has the potential to save us so much stress and uncertainty. But as a creative person, as a man of letters, there is one aspect of the AI revolution that does concern me a bit, and that is the phenomenon of AI generated creative material such as poetry.

As a published poet, AI generated poetry is of particular concern, but not because it’s a new and powerful competitor. Yes, AI generated poetry can range from obviously computer generated and therefore mediocre to actually quite decent, maybe even emotive. After all, you could absolutely train a model with the works of Shakespeare, Woodsworth, Byron, Yeats and so on so as to have it adopt their respective styles. You can most certainly train a model to understand different poem forms and write decent pieces in those forms. Where I’m going is that you can make an AI model into a very competent poet. Some of them probably are way better than me, and that’s completely fine.

My one concern is something else. What concerns me is that something like this could enable a generation that lacks creative instincts. Why put the hours, days, or even weeks required to produce one decent poem when AI can produce something perfectly acceptable in seconds? The time savings are obvious after all if you need something for an assignment, or something cute to impress a girl without too much cost and time effort. However, there are important benefits to investing the time.

A poet learns a lot of things through the effort expended. From my own experience I’ve learned to use words in clever and playful ways that I find enrich my interactions, both written and oral, with people. It has made me a livelier person when I choose to tap into that side. I’ve also learned to see hidden relationships. The creation of interesting and evocative pieces requires tying in objects and ideas that seem totally unrelated into a cohesive work. That sort of creative intuition is also the same sort of creative intuition that’s built the modern world, including the AI revolution, the new industrial revolution which we are living through. And finally, spending the time to craft a work of poetry allows you to do the important personal work required to live a fuller life. From understanding your emotions to learning to see the beauty in ordinary, mundane things, actually sitting down and creating something from scratch is an act of personal investigation, of personal enrichment.

There is also one more remark I want to make. Humans are bound to create. There is nothing more intrinsically human than creating something from nothing. So if I give young readers any advice at all, it would be to create something from nothing, and to learn to not take shortcuts. Nothing worth happening happens easily. It takes time and effort. Yes, today you get what you need much faster than a couple of generations ago; almost instantaneously even. However, innovation always takes time, so if you have big dreams of shaping the future, be it through artistic or scientific means, get used to having to make consistent effort for long periods of time. And remember that there’ll be that satisfaction in the end, and no time or effort saved by AI generation can replace that.

Again, AI is not an enemy. It will change the world in many positive ways. Even for poets there are positive impacts. There already exist AI powered poem analyzers that give detailed analyses of pieces that will allow poets to refine their skills and better understand their craft. There also exists AI that gives feedback on ideas that perhaps could have been further explored within a piece, or metaphors that may not quite work for example. AI can be a powerful new ally in building the poets of tomorrow, but it should be used with that intention, and not as an author in and of itself. Otherwise, all it will do is suck the joy out of creating and turn what was once a prized art form into a cheap, easily produced and reproduced commodity. That would be a tragic fate for the art of poetry that Percey Bysshe Shelley described as “unlatching the backdoor of the psyche” and for the artists of poetry who Shelley described as “the creators and protectors of moral and civil laws” in his seminal essay “A Defense Of Poetry”.