I'd rather eat a fork than read AI-generated poetry (and I do not like eating forks)

a thing I believe

Over the last couple of years, I’ve sheepishly tossed a few twigs on the AI vs. human creativity bonfire. I’ve tried to keep my pieces nuanced, because it’s obviously true that AI isn’t all bad or all good.

Today, however, I’ve carved off a tiny slice of the discourse — a burnt little corner-piece focused on AI-generated poetry — so that I can state a belief or two without drowning you in qualifiers and “could-be”s. Today, subscriber count and brand equity and many other silly things be damned, I’m going to call it like I see it. Maybe some of you see it the same way.

To set the scene:

“I am not, and will never be, interested in reading AI-generated poetry. Reading AI-generated poetry is like eating a fork — and I do not like eating forks.”

–Samuel Forbes, today

I tend to agree with myself here. And to be honest, I can’t believe it’s even a debate at this stage. I would genuinely rather read the worst poem ever written by a human than the best poem ever produced by AI.

I do not care if you used 17 prompts to get ChatGPT to cobble together a scintillating 31-verse poetic interpretation of Samuel L. Jackson’s Pulp Fiction monologue. I do not care if you meticulously calibrated your LLM over the course of three years to invoke the Voices of Poets Past in exactly the right balance to generate what you consider “original” poetry. The depth of how much I do not care is unfathomable.¹

There are many, many reasons for this. The biggest one has to do with what a smart fellow named Adam calls “coming-from-ness.” In his words, “…it’s about realizing that the thing you’re reading comes from somewhere. Good writing is thick with that coming-from-ness.” It matters a great deal to me that what I’m reading represents something. A personality, a purpose, a history, a struggle, a story. I care as much about the chaos behind the curtain as the drama unfolding on stage.

But it’s not just about where writing comes from. It’s about what creativity compels us to do. It’s about the changes we have to undergo in order for creation to be possible, and how great writing evinces those changes.

Wrestling with a poem is painful. Thanks to some snickering sadist of a deity (or perhaps just a series of random chemical boom-booms), creativity requires pain. And this pain is part of what drives us to make amends or leave an abusive relationship, to seek out nature or slink alone into the corner of a seedy bar, to scream or sing or do whatever human thing is needed to relieve the tension, the dissonance, the fluttering agony of an idea uncreated. Being creative is being human.

In my experience, this seems to be what it takes to write poetry. And if dialogue with an LLM is a core piece of that process, I consider it a tremendous tragedy. Not because AI can’t be useful in some contexts — of course it can — but because there are a million better, richer ways to distill yourself into a poem. It’s like bathing in lukewarm pothole water when the sea is only a few hundred feet away.

Maybe that’s it, at the end of the day. Maybe my problem with AI-generated poetry isn’t that it might zap-fry the planet’s oceans and irrevocably damage the atmosphere, or that it might destroy our species’ collective ability to think critically and creatively, or that it definitely mercilessly abuses my best friend, the em-dash — it’s that, instead of doing the insane human stuff needed to create a poem (the work of creating), AI invites us to tap away at a keyboard and wait for the soulless machine² to peddle us something that feels like divine inspiration.

Call me crazy, but I’m willing to be a grubby little luddite for the sake of poetry. Because when all’s said and done, I don’t care if an LLM has chewed on an elephant-sized corpus of data and spit out the carcass of an avant-garde soliloquy. I care about the meat in the middle.

I want to know why Ada Limón likes the lady horses best, what drove Donald Justice to invoke the absent flowers abounding, and what it took for you to, madly and against all logic, turn your pain into something alive.

1. Okay, yes, I care enough to write an essay about it. But in my defense — shhh.

2. Speaking of souls, what about when AI becomes a person? Or at least, has most of the faculties that humans have (e.g., reasoning, emotion, and self-awareness) and sits in a similar context (is born without choosing, has specific experiences, engages in heated debates about pizza toppings, and then dies)? What sets we wet bags of electrical impulses apart from AI then?

Practically speaking, nothing. But I get the feeling that it ain’t happening soon, because AI is far better at mimicry than it is at being an original…being. Once AI clears whatever thresholds we’ve defined for “personhood,” maybe I’ll crack open a collection of its poems, poems that are thick with “coming-from-ness” — with hatred, love, self-doubt, elation, suffering, arousal, and apathy. Probably, most of these poems will suck. (But in the peculiar human way of sucking, not the generic AI way of sucking.)

And that’s how I’ll know it’s the real stuff. :)

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