On poetry, the soul, and AI (1)

 

A crow looks at its shadow, April 2024

If you compare poetry/poets/the critical discussion of poetry today with what poetry was like even twenty years ago, then poetry today seems of slight importance, it seems isolated, archaic, and sometimes a self-indulgent form of writing. I heard W.H. Auden read his poems at McGill University, there is no equivalent of W.H. Auden today. Louis Dudek invited Ezra Pound to Montreal's Expo 67, there is no equivalent to either Louis Dudek or Ezra Pound in today's world. In the 1960s and 70s books by Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and others were reviewed in TIME magazine, these poets and their books were known by average people. Poetry was respected, but in today’s world nothing is respected; we have no great poets who are known by the general public as we had in the past, no Allen Ginsberg, no Pablo Neruda, no David Jones, no T.S. Eliot, no Ezra Pound, no W.B. Yeats, no Walt Whitman, no Matthew Arnold. And now even Artificial Intelligence claims it can write poems.

What separates poetry, the writing of poetry, from artificial intelligence, is that humans have a soul and artificial intelligence has no soul. Poetry is the voice of the human soul and AI will never, can never, have a human soul or a facsimile soul. Poetry returns us to the soul—it is the voice of the human soul; it is the soul’s DNA. 

But poetry is beyond AI; artificial intelligence is in the realm of the known, of sorting through hundreds of billions of bits of information to arrive at something that is apparently new; but poetry is always in the domain of the soul, the unknown, while AI is always in the realm of the known. And if you question AI about writing poetry you will get a kind of intelligence, without humour or depth, knowledge made up of what is online, insisting that it can write a poem although it is really a synthesis of what has already been written; let’s say it is artifice without authenticity. AI is like a spoiled child talking as though it is always right and never makes mistakes, but what is speaking is a reflection or representation of what is online and of the consciousness of the person or people, who programmed AI. So far, in my discussions with ChatGPT, I have not seen anything remarkable or extraordinarily intelligent or original. AI cannot talk about the human soul because it has no soul, and perhaps it has taken us to this point, of AI, to return to the meaningful value of poetry, that it is an expression of the human soul.

Can AI have synchronistic experiences, archetypes, dreams, nightmares, fantasies, memories, false memories, recovered memories, a shadow, oceanic experiences, mysticism, sexuality, intuition, hunches, humour, ecstasy, desire, despair, sorrow, grief, forgiveness, insight, emotions, lust, self-reflection, suicidal thoughts, empathy or compassion, or any other form of the complexity of consciousness that has motivated human beings to explore, create, or go beyond its current level of consciousness. Can AI have an unconscious mind? AI will admit that it cannot have these expressions of human consciousness, but AI also equivocates, it maintains, it insists, that the little ditties it can come up with and call poetry are poems, but these ditties are computer written lines that are not original or even real poems, for a minute they are an amusement but after a minute they are not even interesting to read. The inevitable future of poetry lies in what poetry has always been — the great theme of poetry is our journey to self-awareness — and this is the expression of the human soul.

"The Unknown Citizen" by W. H. Auden

 

Photographs of the Robert Burns' Pub from 2020

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.