The internets seem abuzz these days with fears and embrace of AI apps. On one hand, the people who are struggling with lazy undergrads using them to cheat or lit mags struggling to deal with an influx of AI- generated stories (even more interesting, a SCI-FI mag). In the news last week, a bizarre convo in which a an AI persona, Sydney, tried to convince a programmer to leave his wife. On the other, people who are using it to play around with as a creative exercise itself. It's fascinating and slightly horrific at the same time, especially as I see numerous ads--in social feeds, on youtube--as a content writer touting the ability of the technology to help you do your job for you. Increased profits, less time. Or actually DO your job, which, of course, means you may no longer have one. If all we have between us and the bots is speed and word counts and productivity, humans are severely lacking.
My opinion is that if people are gonna cheat and be shady, they will always find ways to do it. And just because its a lot of output, that doesn't mean it's quality or interesting content. Many have cited the easily identifiable ticks of AI, which may become less as formulas and programs are finessed, but it's strange in a world where so much is based on the cult of personality that AI would seem at all appealing.
It's the same whenever I see a headline or discussion about plagiarizing one author's work by another. Maybe its bigger in fiction, where the "I" is so much less important than in poetry. Poems are expressions of truth and individuality, and without those things, I don't think they fly very well. But then experimentation with language is also cool--including experiments with google and translators and even something as analog as centos and blackout poetry that mix up and mess with existing texts. I think somewhere in all the AI stuff, there is a possibility for experimentation. I have a project I might delve a bit more into this when the time comes--a series of poems about technology itself and strange 70s technogrotesque films I've been wanting to do, like a series of love letters between humans and computers.
As for visual art, I have already played a bit with Canva's text-to-image generator, and while I've gotten some interesting results, including the above masterpiece (office+ victorian woman+cow+ duck), mostly I got a lot of fragments that while not my style (obviously) were somewhat useful in collages. You can tell the machine to make something, but it'd be hard to convey the things that make your art, well yours. I did a series of prompts about "antique women + deer" and got all sorts of things, about 4-5 of which were salvageable. I was able to cut and paste into other collages with my desired elements. Others were imperfect on their own, but were prompts for me to recreate them as I wanted. Others just spun off a single detail or a slice of the image. Others just inspired by the subject matter and out of my own head. There were also a lot of weird faces and six-fingered hands, which is where AI falters a bit. As I started the sea monsters series this week, I ran a few prompts since I was already working in Canva but it wasn't quite giving me anything of use, so I'm going it alone. It's a nice tool, perhaps. I may even have gotten a book cover option for granata that I played a bit with and added things. to and tweaked.
I imagine maybe it will be like this for writing once all the hoopla dies down. Profs will figure out ways to gear class writings toward more individualistic topics (which really should be better for students anyway.) Us content writers will hopefully still have jobs when the bots prove to be not only highly inaccurate sometimes but kind of boring and lacking in persona (and still take someone human to edit out the kinks.).
As for the poets, considering the strange "poetic" end-rhymed results I've seen, ie, exactly what the internet somehow thinks a poem would be, I don't think we have anything to worry about.
