Artificial Intelligence and Poetry

 

2012

            

It is through human expression that we can defeat the over arching digital tyranny; through joy and poetry we can assert our humanity.

--Richard Olafson, Shifting Towards Vitalism (2023)

In the old days, when home computers were just beginning to be available to the public, some poets made poems using computer technology and their own original programmes; some of these poems were permutations of phrases, some resulted in Surrealistic visual images, and while a few of these poems were interesting they were basically meaningless as poetry and never real poems. Now we’ve moved on to Artificial Intelligence writing, well, anything you want it to write including poetry. 

There is a short video on YouTube of Joe Rogan telling us that blood, discovered at the bottom of the Ark of the Covenant, had been analysed and was the blood of Jesus Christ, proving both His divinity and His existence. This video was, of course, a creation of Artificial Intelligence, it was a hoax, an attempt to fool or deceive people. This, and other videos created by Artificial Intelligence, gives one pause, what if this video was of someone in authority making some statement that people believed but it was all lies or propaganda? We are concerned with AI because it is one of the recent technologies that could be disastrous for humanity, and excluding some positive uses the existence of AI, for most people, is frightening, it is to deceive the viewer. What do we believe, and who do we believe, if technology can now perfectly duplicate the voice and facial characteristics of people in authority? Or if AI can write fake texts? There have always been false or fake texts and there will be more in the future generated by AI technology. 

Why anyone would want to write AI poems is beyond me, there is no money in poetry, there is no fame, there is nothing to gain except possibly some amusement or novelty. AI can write screen plays, articles for Sports Illustrate magazine and newspapers, content for websites, PhD dissertations, term papers, or whatever someone wants and it is inexpensive, fast, possibly accurate, and he/she doesn't have to do the writing or pay an actual human writer. But poetry? Perhaps because poetry is of increasingly less value to society it is doubtful that anyone will write poems using AI except as a prank, a joke, or out of curiosity. But there is something important to learn from this possible use of Artificial Intelligence and poetry: it is to remember what it means to be human.

Can AI ever write poetry? It is not possible for one reason: poetry is the voice of the human soul and computers don't have souls. Even if computer technology becomes so sophisticated that a computer thinks it is an autonomous human being, that it attains "personhood", it will still not be poetry. Poetry requires a human being writing poems and this requires living in the physical world with real life relationships with other human beings. Even if an intelligent human-looking robot could be created, with built-in AI, it is still a computer and it has no soul. Even if you could programme in the functions of a soul--for instance, compassion, understanding, empathy, emotions, spirituality, awe, a family history, and reflection on the past--and this computer writes "poetry", it is still not poetry, it still can't express what the human soul can express. A human has a biological level of existence and a computer is man-made, it is a machine even if it is the most sophisticated machine made by man. And a computer can never have a style of writing that is honed by experience and a multiplicity of events that organize themselves randomly and are the result of events far too complicated to ever be duplicated or created in themselves. AI and its progression, a humanoid robot, is always manufactured by people, or descended from a generation of computers invented and manufactured by people; it is not created by sexual intercourse, there is no hormonal basis to AI, it has no belief in spirituality (or anything else), it has no traditions whether religious, ancestral, cultural, historical, or genetic that human beings have, and if sometime in the future it has some of these qualities, they will always be artificially created and not the result of human interaction; AI will never have genuine human qualities. Even if  one day AI can identify as "human" it is still not the real thing. If we come to a time when computers think they are human beings, or the equivalent of human beings, with free will and emotions and mobility, it is possible that robots will take over from human beings, but even then whatever a robot with AI can express will never be real poetry. AI can write a facsimile poem but never a real poem. By definition only a human being can write a real poem just as only a human being can react to that poem with emotions and human reflection. AI and the human soul are mutually exclusive.