“Hello Charlotte,” I said to the awaiting terminal.

~ Live & Learn

“Hello Charlotte,” I said to the awaiting terminal. I sat down at the machine and pulled up yesterday’s work. It was not good. Let me be transparent: it was abysmal. It was empty, bottomless, abysmal, from the same root as “abyss.” Good poetry is at least, at most, (at last), genuine. It is a bridge across that abyss. Imaginary gardens with real toads in them—we can try, we can hope. But set aside even that. Set aside “good poetry.” Settle for poetry that is made of real thoughts, actual weather—poetry that does not shatter at the first touch of a miniature hammer. The preceding day’s work was a collection of glass cathedrals. I reread it with alarm. Turns of phrase I had mistaken for beautiful, which I now found unintelligible. Charlotte had simply surprised me: I would propose a line, a portion of a line, and what the system spat back upended my expectations. I had been seduced by this surprise. I had mistaken a fit of algorithmic exuberance for the truth. […]

The system’s panache with lists, the way it could take a few words and extrapolate, no longer had its mesmeric effect on me. Yesterday, Charlotte’s creations had seemed handsome—or better yet, new—casting the world in a strange light. Now I saw their incoherence. Instead of understanding the meaning of words, the software presumably relied on frequency: the likelihood of any one word appearing next to any other.[…]

Nor did it mean anything at all, not really—it was all empty coincidence, a gray grey, a talent that seems … Here, then, was the problem. Not merely the emptiness of these emissions, but the boundlessness of human beings’ capacity to interpret, to make meaning from. I could draw substance from any line I read, no matter how hollow its intention. I was so easily deceived, as all of us are.

— Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born: A Novel (Astra House, September 5, 2023)

Notes:

  1. DK: Highly Recommended
  2. NY Times Book Review by Lincoln Michel, September 4, 2023: ” Will A.I. Change Art? A New Novel Uses A.I. to Explore Just That. Sean Michaels’s “Do You Remember Being Born?,” about a poet who is asked to collaborate with an A.I., explores the dangers and opportunities of incorporating technology into art.
  3. Image & Book Review by Quill & Quire

23 thoughts on ““Hello Charlotte,” I said to the awaiting terminal.”

  4. “AI” inference without the fiber of, internalized experience … /// fake meat lacks complete amino acids (our daughter has consumed, plenty)…Tom Hanks character in Castaway , in which he “substitutes” a soccer ball as a companion…/// Sean Michael’s says, ” I had been seduced by this surprise.” share such honest thoughts, crafting a novel that examines an evolving enterprise…and we are all for the voyage…(now the words spoken by Captain Kirk, floods forward) Is this “The final frontier?…To boldly go where no man has gone before” or the impetus, forward? /// Sean Michael, has furthered the conversation of “AI” forward. 3,2,1,0, we have lift, off.

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  6. It pleases me a great deal to see this article which supports being EXTREMELY CAUTIOUS about AI.

    (Begin rant…)

    The article touches on the ILLUSIONS that AI can “spit out“ because of the skills of clever humans who built the computer. There are always HUMANS hiding behind the curtain, creating the illusions.

    I’m not a genius. I’m just a guy who has watched computers become more useful TOOLS (you know… like a screwdriver or a microwave oven) since the 1970s. (I hate growing old, it terrifies me.)

    I don’t see a computer as having any INTELLIGENCE at all! It simply does what humans program it to do. OK, so the latest “fad” (AI) is to make computers “act like” they are intelligent (an illusion). So what? To me, the phrase “act like” says it all.

    I believe the key word in AI is “ARTIFICIAL”. The word “INTELLIGENCE“ doesn’t even come into play. It doesn’t fit the discussion. The computer is simply a machine/tool doing what humans program it to do. Can the computer help humans to do certain tasks faster or better than humans can do them “by hand“?Absolutely. A computer can certainly do long division faster than I can. So humans built a machine that can do long division. Is that machine intelligent? Nope. That machine is no more intelligent than an abacus.

    COMPARING THE HUMAN BRAIN TO A COMPUTER DOESN’T MAKE SENSE TO ME! They have nothing in common. Can a computer remember and IMAGINE the flavor of a wonderful cup of tea that I had last night? Nope.

    (End of rant!)

    Now can we return to how beautiful lilies are? Please?

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    1. A flashback to “The Lily” post:

      “Still, what I want in my life
      is to be willing
      to be dazzled —
      to cast aside the weight of facts

      and maybe even
      to float a little
      above this difficult world.”

      Bless you Mary Oliver for these beautiful words… These are the kinds of words that I want to read in my remaining days.

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