flâneur

⚡️ Robots Write Experimental Poetry

joinreboot.org · 2,426 words · saved by 1 readers

Poetry has a rich history; is GPT-3’s really so special? In today’s essay, Shira Abramovich, a poet with a degree in literary arts, places AI-generated poetry in context of a long tradition in experimental and computational literature, and provides a framework for thinking through the questions that matter when it comes to experimental poetry — AI-generated or otherwise. By Shira Abramovich In its period of limited release, GPT-3 has accumulated a dizzying list of bylines. It’s written for the Guardian, the New York Times’ Modern Love column, with oddly poetic results, and even included in a New Yorker article by Stephen Marche to write new poetry in the style of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Does this count as real writing? Or real poetry? After all, to quote Marche’s article in the New Yorker, “GPT-3 is a tool. It does not think or feel. It performs instructions in language.” Does its inability to think, notice, or feel prevent the poetic text from being real poetry? This question is actu

Poetry has a rich history; is GPT-3’s really so special? In today’s essay, Shira Abramovich, a poet with a degree in literary arts, places AI-generated poetry in context of a long tradition in experimental and computational literature, and provides a framework for thinking through the questions that matter when it comes to experimental poetry — AI-generated or otherwise. By Shira Abramovich In its period of limited release, GPT-3 has accumulated a dizzying list of bylines. It’s written for the Guardian, the New York Times’ Modern Love column, with oddly poetic results, and even included in…

related reading