Why AI poetry will always be rubbish, no matter how good it gets

Communique number two

'All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' Ernest Hemingway

I’ve always been wary of ventriloquising in poetry. Even though it is the lot of all story tellers to put words into other people’s mouths, to relentlessly imagine what it is to be someone other than yourself. Many someones in fact.

Was it John Lennon who said that authenticity is the key, if you can fake that then you’ve got it made. It sounds like him anyway, and it points to the horns of writers’ collective dilemma. That we paint fictions, but we’re also grappling towards the truth, if only to see it from an angle, at a distance.

However much craft goes into writing a piece of poetry, for example, if it isn’t anchored by something true, something real about the poet, coming from a tangible place inside of themselves, then it’s just words. Pretty perhaps, but empty.

A well crafted lie can bring you nearer the truth, sometimes, aiding narrative or structure. It can allow you to amplify existing elements, luring them to the fore like salt bringing flavour to the surface of a meal.

Certainly with political poems they can sometimes be too straight talking, too on the nose. Whenever I’m tempted to write about explicitly political subjects I ask myself, ‘is this just a Guardian article with some word play thrown in?’ and if I cannot answer that question honestly then I’m forced to go back to the drawing board and write another poem about ducks.

Personal stories can be told in a straighter poetic style because we have so few spaces to tell those stories, but the standard for political poetry needs to be a little higher. There needs to be a proper reason that it is a poem rather than an essay or angry letter to the paper. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

No matter how tempted I’d never even start writing, say, a war poem in the style of Sassoon or Owen. Not just because they will have said it better but because these aren’t my stories to tell, they’d be empty echoes of their verses because their version of the war has captured my imagination so completely.

When it comes to the truthiness of war writing I think of the way that Catch 22 and Slaughter House Five both rely on the unreliability of memory, the fog of combat, the delirium of fear in order to try to say something nearer to how it felt to bombed, or to be the bomber, than simple facts could ever allow. The fractured consciousness embedded in the narrative structure of both those books takes us nearer the real because of, rather than despite, their fantastical nature.

And this is why AI will never write poetry worth a damn.

Right now ChatGPT et al can just about write an A level standard formal poem. It surprises because it looks and feels like poetry. The slips it makes can amuse, the flawed programming occasionally giving the appearance of wild creativity.

I can’t make it write poetry that does not rhyme and it has no idea what a joke is, let alone a good joke, but it can produce a sonnet that you could pass off as your own, if you’d like to be known as someone who writes straight bat, mediocre poetry - and frankly that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

That’s all by the by though. Let’s imagine for a moment that the next twenty years does not involve climate catastrophe and the immiseration of the human race. AI’s technique will probably improve significantly in the decades to come. It’s no great leap of imagination to think it could become capable of putting together a war poem that surpasses in form and structure everything that went before, leaving the masters in the dust. Its technique could surpass unaided human capability.

It would still be rubbish.

Why? Because it’s a language simulation, giving us an impression of what feelings might look like, so there is no reaching out between souls, no sharing of the real. It leaks water from its eye holes because that is what’s expected of it, it rubs them with smooth knuckles even as it peeps at you to see if its achieving its goal.

I don’t know about you but if I read an honest poem about someone’s father dying it does not have to be from a Nobel Lauriat to set me off. It could have clunky rhymes, flat footed rhythms and, frankly, have little original to say - I’d still be spattering the page in tears even as I reach for my red marking pen of doom.

The poem’s power is in the emotional resonance of the subject matter, the substance of what it has to say, as well as how it says it. If nothing lies behind the lines but blinking diodes and end user requests, well, it’s an empty space - and not in a good way.

A machine pretending to mourn mocks the human heart.

When Sassoon wrote of the Great Men of the Earth that they “approve with smiles and bland salutes the rage and monstrous tyranny that they have brought to birth.” part of the power of those words lie in the fact that he had stood in mud and blood and he had watched the generals and politicians bask in its reflected sanctity.

His hatred was real, grown in French soil fertilised with the lives of his comrades. He had tasted the monsters on the hill and the grief of the world.

An algorithm designed to predict language has no tongue with which to taste, and no eyes with which to weep. It’s a party trick at best, at least when it comes to poetry, and frankly I’ve always hated parties.

There is both technique and meaning

It will have to do

If there ever was a day, to say,
'I don't like this'
it was yesterday,
or maybe the day before,
or all the warring weeks preceding,
but / sadly the world
is given to / constant turning
resolving to revolve
bowling down the too smooth corridors of
what we choose to term time
so / today will have to do

and if there ever was a voice
with which to say 
'no more'
then let it have 
a booming / magnanimous
honk

the kind that
disassembled
the ringing walls of Jericho
and flushed out
the bowels of
every discordant swindler
whose clapper board clap trap, distils in time to poison

but, given that my little larynx
is all I kinda got,
then it will have to do.
I'll have the cheek to squeak it, even though,
out of tune / out of step / out of range,
but
given that I can't exchange it
yes, please,
it will have to play its part 

And three recommendations

To round off I’d just like to point you towards a couple of things.

• I’ve been reading a jolly interesting book from

  Fly on the Wall Press
  “The Process of Poetry” edited by Rosanna McGlone.
  
  In it Rosanna interviews leading poets about the way they write poetry. What, I think, is unique (and is certainly new to me) is that it includes the first and then final draft of a poem from each author and then discusses how it got from its raw state, to its final polished form. Fascinating stuff.

• I was at Barnsley Zine Fair last weekend and seeing all the creativity and punk / DIY attitude on display made my heart swell.
  
  It reminded me that a few years ago I wrote a stream of consciousness piece, The Day They Threw Me Out of Zine Club, featuring the ghosts of photocopiers past and half remembered unjust gripes. It was an ode to the creative, imperfect spirit of zine makers and I’m still pretty happy with it.

• And lastly, if you live in the Sheffield area, this Saturday Attila the Stockbroker will be bringing music, poetry, ranting and who knows what else to the Shakespeares. There are still tickets left at the time of typing so come along if you fancy hearing from the veteran punk poet.