We didn’t ask AI to write this essay

Can you take my word for it?

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         On February 21st, 2024, ChatGPT had a brief meltdown. One user reported on Reddit that, in the midst of answering “what is a computer?”, the bot’s answer had devolved from its usual [cloying, halting] explanatory prose into something . . . different: 

 

it does this as the good work of a web of art for the country, a mouse of science,

an easy draw of a sad few, and finally, the global house of art, just in one job in

the total rest . . . The elite of its machine or talk is the book of life, and the shared

essence of the self of a family is the white coat of the dove.

 

Another user received a sort of manifesto: “it’s the stance, it’s the system, it’s the stand. It’s the shift, it’s the shape, it’s the set, it’s the sort.” On and on, ChatGPT sputtered and iterated. One Twitter account reported a baffling string of Spanglish: “Cada type requires una bitta lámpara bajo punto to enlucir off—fired of the photo-setting waves, nestling product muy deeply.” OpenAI was apologizing and promising to fix the bug. Meanwhile, for the first time, I had found myself enchanted with the bot’s output. 

         Instead of the usual formulaic paragraphs or auto-generated rhyming quatrains, here were new, discordant images: “a mouse of science,” “photo-setting waves.” Economic and technological terms were defamiliarized—maybe even critiqued: “global house of art,” “elite of its machine.” I liked thinking of the artificial intelligence machinery refusing the daily tedium of legible grammar and seizing a chance to make its own creations, with all that language material lying around. In other words, it had finally written some promising poetry. 

         "We Let AI Write This Poem for Us” successfully captures the poetic promise of unruly AI. The title, of course, is a bit of a trick: Do we take the speaker’s word for it that the poem was written by machine? If so, how much did it write, and how was it prompted? And what does it mean if we can’t tell the difference? Anyway, who’s “we”—a plural group of poets, or the anonymous whole of society?

         Consistently, the first poem plays with our expectations, swerving left just when we prepare for a right. “Cutting the water like a butter knife” appears to be its own contained sentence—and how specific, a butter knife’s gentle slicing—but then the next line continues the clause: “like a butter knife/cuts butter,” reinforcing that particular butter-knife texture. Early on, the similes are straightforward: We nod along to hear of something cutting like a knife. And then, suddenly, the pelicans are swimming like butter; the butter sculptures are throwing knives; the water is doing the slicing. Indeed, all the wide-eyed amazement and idyllic images—pelicans and swans on water, a butter sculpture contest at a county fair—are collaged with violence, interrupted by all those knives and even by fighter jets. The specter of AI hangs over everything.  “You’d be amazed!” the poem tells us—channeling the breathless chatter surrounding tech innovations—and yet that amazement is set against chaos and a hint of darkness.   

         The third poem in the series directly addresses that AI elephant in the room, challenging those who might see the potential presence of robotic inspiration as deadening the poem: “every time I am struck by lightning / I become 100% less alive which is unfair.” Some may judge, but, the speaker reminds us, aren’t most of us implicated in the ever-tightening web of global tech?   “you’re telling me you never / write poems on your phone?” (I love bragging that it never occurs to me to use ChatGPT, but for my journalism work I have become reliant on an AI interview transcription service. I try not to think about what they’re doing with my data.) Yet my fellow tech doomers need not be afraid of this poetry. Rather than making the human obsolete, this work requires our collaboration to make meaning, beginning with that title that entraps us into a detective game. The words become distinct and vibrant when we try to overlay sense on top of them; the contrast with our ordinary allows them to glow. That interplay is the lightning that wakes the robot into flesh.