“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:
- DK: Highly Recommended
- 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.
- Image & Book Review by Quill & Quire
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