As soon as A.I. speaks: When A.I. and poetry meet
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Artificial Intelligence is very prevalent in the academic field, making workshops like these extremely valuable to students.
On Sept. 20 in the Kinetic Gallery inside the MacVittie College Union the first of two workshops under the title “As Soon as A.I. Speaks: Poetry x A.I.” was held by Dr. Lytton Smith, a professor of poetry here at SUNY Geneseo. The workshop went from 4 p.m. until 6 p.m. and throughout these two hours, Dr. Smith had the student attendees write independently, explore in-development artificial intelligence (A.I.) writing tools, and learn language to be able to more effectively talk and learn about both poetry and A.I.
He offers this workshop series as an extension of the ‘ENGL 403: Poetry: A.I. and Prompt Engineering’ course he is running this fall as a way to bring more students from across disciplines into the conversation about how budding technologies will continue to interact with and influence art as we move into the future. He notes how often on college campuses, its members can “get stuck in [their] disciplines, but [that] there are poets all across campus, in all fields....many great poets and writers are/were scientists.”
At the workshop's beginning, attendees were asked to take some time to write a personal, reflective narrative addressing what made that person uniquely identifiable as themselves to an outsider or friend and what kind of expression made the individual feel the most themself. From there, the group examined a series of contemporary poems from different authors and were asked to pick out poems that stood out to them and what the reader found to be particularly notable, unique, or interesting about them. Setting this foundational work in the personal helped to frame the conversation surrounding later exercises utilizing A.I. tools by subtly establishing an overarching yet unspoken question to the workshop: How do you know something is yours, and what causes something to not feel like yours?
The A.I. tools used in the workshop were Google’s Verse by Verse, an A.I. poetry generator taught to write poetry that mimics the style of prominent writers whose work has hit the “fair use” guidelines, and Microsoft’s Copilot, a much more standard prompt-based chatbot. While using these, Dr. Smith encouraged participants to consider whether they felt a certain tool created poems that the participants felt more ownership over and also whether the A.I. even seemed to be able to create poems effectively.
In the conversation surrounding A.I., Dr. Smith notes that, “…there's perhaps more conversation than doing/trying out, and that can lead to abstraction…[that’s] why I wanted to design interactive workshops…The more we try out technologies, the more we understand both their creative possibilities and their limitations or challenges.” After the exercises, attendees noted that they felt the poems created through/by the A.I. were decidedly the definition of fine. With the A.I. language models being largely trained on very traditional poems that follow regular structure and rhyme guidelines, the poems created can seem a little cheesy or trite to a more contemporary, and often free-verse, poet. The A.I. certainly did not try to take too many risks and ended up creating poems that the group considered to be possibly marketable but not transformative, shocking, or new.
Overall, Dr. Smith hopes to get students to better recognize how all writing technology was looked upon with as much consideration, skepticism, and wonder as A.I. is being met with now, noting, “The creation of art goes hand in hand with the instruments available to us: when the typewriter became widely available, poets and writers spent a lot of time thinking and writing about how it revolutionized what it meant to compose and what it made possible for readers.”
At the next workshop, happening on Oct. 18, 2024, in the Kinetic Gallery from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., Dr. Smith hopes to provide attendees time to draft and work on poems that either utilize A.I. in some form during the writing process or are centered around A.I./generative art in some way. These will then be available to submit to a gallery he is putting together for the semester's end in collaboration with his course.
Dr. Smith encourages all to come by and partake in the next workshop and says there is no need to attend the first to come to the second or to be familiar with poetry writing at all. He hopes that he will see you there (Oct. 18, 4 p.m., be there or be square)!