Why don’t we notice … ?
Late to the Table
The conversation seems to have moved beyond AI for the moment, but when everyone was talking about it, I tried to craft a poem in the 5-7-5 haiku format that might possibly address some of the questions and worries we have about AI and its impact on our lives and our art.
without the help of AI
still be found moving?
I have a few longtime friends that I keep in touch with by sending one-sided rambling audio letters to. They tend to go on for 15 minutes or more. In a recent letter I received, a friend suggested I try asking AI to write haiku, just to see what it produced. Later in her letter, she added another idea, one that sounded a little more interesting to me, Why not ask AI to make a list of haiku writing prompts for ideas you can work with and explore?
I haven’t tried doing this yet, but I do like the idea, and I did see something this past Friday night that seems to demonstrate how AI can be used to help (not replace) creators. While drinking cheap high-balls in a smokey yaki-tori restaurant, a friend of mine showed me some recent flyers he had designed for area restaurants. All the pictures he had used were made with Midjourney. The layouts and the design elements were completely original, but the pictures, which my friend typically spends hours searching for, were made in a matter of minutes. With AI, he can now speed up his workflow and quickly access realistic photographs of people doing the things he needs them to do without having to worry about copyright infringement, and without even using a real person’s face.
How this translates to writing, I don’t know, but I do like the idea of quickly generating writing prompts and questions to think about.
gather dust and clutter the
corners of my heart.
by brush, pen, chalk, or pencil.
Is it still haiku?
the first star to disappear
into the dawn’s light?
their flowers like bulging fruit,
have yet to open.
deep in the forest, the sound
of a nearby car.
the form will release you from
your fear to begin.
by watching your neighbors
take out the garbage.
Your haiku is very disquieting. I think we will continue to be moved by poems written without the help of artificial intelligence, but soon we will lose the ability to distinguish whether a poem that moves us was written by a machine or not. For the time being, I believe that chatgpt and the like are not prepared to write good poetry and the help they can provide by contributing ideas would only be commonplace. At least in the tests I did it turned out that way (I published something here). But in the future they will surely improve and even some artificial intelligence optimized for writing poetry could appear (in case someone would be interested...). I liked the rest of your poems a lot too, but I kept thinking about the first one... Cheers!
That was an interesting experiment that you did. It led me to try a few of my own last night.
I agree, one of the things that is unique about striking poetry and literature is its ability to surprise, which is often the result of odd decisions or misunderstandings that occur on a human level.
No doubt, at some point AI will become better at incorporating these things, and readers will often not be able to tell if what they are reading is AI generated or not.
I guess what I was exploring was not so much the ability of AI to write well, but a future in which people actually write less and less, and a future where AI is better able to anticipate human emotions and the digital world they are attracted to.
Or maybe we have more time and can write more and more poetry, although considering history, inventions that promise to give us more free time, end up leaving us with less. Just in case we are the last recognizable human poets, let's keep writing!
we have all manner of writings written by people who remained anonymous, by people who wrote under a name and identity other than their own, and people who have used work they did not create themselves.
I've started using computer generated art to go with my poetry, would that be so different from an artist going the other way round?
hmmm.
anyway, your haiku are great, thanks
Thank you for the compliment. I’m glad to hear you liked them.
Writing is a funny process. We often try to create a specific meaning and then find that our readers create a totally different meaning from the one we intended to give them. It’s the same for artists and musicians.
If people can quickly generate words that suit their needs, I think that is good. As you said, there have been all manner of writers, and some of those writers even made it their art form to cut up the writing of others and reassemble it into a new form. That’s essentially what AI is doing.
I feel like if the writing means something to the reader then it is successful. Whether it’s written by a computer or a person doesn’t really matter.
I haven't read haiku in a long time, and these are well done. The theme of trees, magnolias and others is very good.
Thank you. I’m happy to be able to put haiku before your eyes after your long absence from them.
At the moment I think that artificial intelligences can only help us a little, but to have emotional experiences is something that I see more difficult, you need blood running through your veins, maybe writing a poem well armed grammatically and using any style will surprise us, but they will never be able to feel pressure in the chest by a bad love or feel the pain for someone who is absent.
I am not a good reader of haiku, I can only tell you that these that you published have a clearer message, greetings.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Thank you for your comment. I was sort of hinting at a future where people write less and less and where they no longer connect to what we think of today as human emotions.
It’s similar to the way we have a hard time watching silent films from the 1920s and early full-length films.
Very creative ideas of using AI to help with the workflow instead of replacing. Sometimes I generate images that inspire me to write poems or other pieces of fiction. Thanks for sharing these ideas.
I like the idea of creating images and word combinations that inspire us. And inspiration is funny. You never quite know what will awake something in you, so randomly generated images is probably a good way to stoke one’s creativity.
After publishing this post, I did try using ChaGPT, and I did ask it for writing prompts, but all of the prompts it gave me are things that I’ve already written about.
I thought that was pretty funny.
Interesting experiments. I can't wait to see how it develops.
I don't usually write haiku but I thought these were great. The last one made me laugh :) Nice work!