Chat GPT can crank out a sonnet in minutes. Specify any form, subject and theme and get a result. Possibly not a solution to the creative urge arising from indigestion, a flea in your bed, or the sensation of drowning, but a distracting breakfast game: pit your wits against the programmers to reveal technology’s strengths (speed, ingenuity) and limitations: a lack of innovative verbs, trenchant metaphors, or cultural resonance. Artificial = superficial.
Put through the Turing Test in 2018, not one AI-generated poem fooled enough of the judging panel into thinking it was written by a human. Seven years on (aeons, in tech terms), the programmers’ focus on abstract reasoning still struggles to factor in embodied experience: what cannot feel cannot have feelings and so cannot empathise. ‘The problem’ says Adrienne Rich in Contradictions, Tracking Poems, ‘is / to connect, without hysteria, the pain / of any one’s body with the pain of the body’s world.’ ‘The body’s world’, she insists, is ‘our raft among the abstract worlds.’
AI will never, unlike Rita Dove in ‘Hades’ Pitch’, fuse the visceral experience of being leered at with Greek mythology; it will never, like Tony Harrison, taste bereavement in his mother’s apple pie; or, like Brian Patten, use emotional intelligence to compare a cat’s sensory world with humans’ emotionally freighted one. Moreover human artists learn from the very act of composition: the physical and mental process modifying the outcome in real time, which AI is some way from doing.
It is also some way from writing a poem of its own accord. Given an essay deadline it won’t instead write a poem about a fox. It is individual humans’ ability to risk-take, transgressing parameters – to bring something felicitous and not merely meretricious to human experience, and to language itself – which gives us the edge.
Poets and editors need worry less for their little egoistic bubbles than for society at large: for AI’s ability to converse and beguile the needy. Worse, its ability to fake not just images but convincing video of any individual – politicians in particular – is a threat to democracy, to children and anyone whose understanding of ‘reality’ is digitally mediated. By now, that’s everyone. Poets can raise this awareness by offering, alongside an ‘overview’ with its implications of top-down authority, an underview. One which grasps the nettle of bodily experience and its concomitant emotions. Emotional Intelligence: EI. Now you’re talking.
Pennine Platform 