Love whenever your name pops up in the inbox : ) Great once again. I finished Byung-Chul Han's "The Scent of Time" the other day and it speaks on some similiar things you've brought up here. I think you might enjoy it x
reminds me of that one as well! can see it too in the preface ‘…hyperkinesia of everyday life deprives human existence of all contemplative elements and of any capacity for lingering. It leads to a loss of world and time. So-called strategies of deceleration do not overcome this temporal crisis; they even cover up the actual problem.’
"Why must poetry make sense? What does it mean, after all, to make sense?"
In the Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes: "To make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.”
And that feels so appropriate to this essay and this quagmire we find ourselves in, where we're using AI to simplify or clarify or optimise in a world in which we've been robbed of the time to ponder and wonder and sense. AI cannot make the sense that Abram defines, which is affirming and freeing and orienting. I don't know if I have a point or a place to go, but I suspect I don't need one x
“…it feels like the poem is working on me—not the other way around”. “In the journal I do not express myself . . . I create myself.”
Suppose there are two poems that happen to be identical, one by genAI and one by genNI (natural intelligence). Are they the same poem? Not if poetry is activity rather result. But the activities of genAI and genNI have more in common than it might seem. LLMs start from a data store that’s pretty much everything that’s ever been written. The poet’s data store is a smaller but still vast subterranean preconscious mind out of which the poem creates itself, sometimes (for me most of the time) with very little conscious manipulation or sense of agency. But the genNI version feels like something as it’s coming out, and it’s a process that the poet can spontaneously renew by reading the poem back in and answering its demand to change or continue. The poet was one person before writing and a new version of that person afterwards, with some of the hidden mind now articulated to the conscious mind. I know more about AI than poetry, and I use genAI as a kind of intelligent thesaurus, but genNI poetry-as-process is sufficiently pleasing and personally useful that it can count even to a novice poet like me as one answer to “what is the purpose of poetry”. There is no such purpose for the machine.
I know I’ve not said anything new about poetry, but I think we’re not remotely ready for the new world of LLMs (and whatever will soon supersede it), and it may be helpful when people who feel the magic of genAI smack it back a bit from a perspective of love and awe.
Love whenever your name pops up in the inbox : ) Great once again. I finished Byung-Chul Han's "The Scent of Time" the other day and it speaks on some similiar things you've brought up here. I think you might enjoy it x
Time for a re-read! BCH was one of the first philosophers I’ve ever read and it’s interesting to see how he still makes his way into my writing
reminds me of that one as well! can see it too in the preface ‘…hyperkinesia of everyday life deprives human existence of all contemplative elements and of any capacity for lingering. It leads to a loss of world and time. So-called strategies of deceleration do not overcome this temporal crisis; they even cover up the actual problem.’
"Why must poetry make sense? What does it mean, after all, to make sense?"
In the Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes: "To make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.”
And that feels so appropriate to this essay and this quagmire we find ourselves in, where we're using AI to simplify or clarify or optimise in a world in which we've been robbed of the time to ponder and wonder and sense. AI cannot make the sense that Abram defines, which is affirming and freeing and orienting. I don't know if I have a point or a place to go, but I suspect I don't need one x
This is beautiful! Thank you for sharing this passage.
I really loved this.
Thank you!
brilliant piece, I really enjoyed reading this
Thank you!
really wonderful, thank you for this
“…it feels like the poem is working on me—not the other way around”. “In the journal I do not express myself . . . I create myself.”
Suppose there are two poems that happen to be identical, one by genAI and one by genNI (natural intelligence). Are they the same poem? Not if poetry is activity rather result. But the activities of genAI and genNI have more in common than it might seem. LLMs start from a data store that’s pretty much everything that’s ever been written. The poet’s data store is a smaller but still vast subterranean preconscious mind out of which the poem creates itself, sometimes (for me most of the time) with very little conscious manipulation or sense of agency. But the genNI version feels like something as it’s coming out, and it’s a process that the poet can spontaneously renew by reading the poem back in and answering its demand to change or continue. The poet was one person before writing and a new version of that person afterwards, with some of the hidden mind now articulated to the conscious mind. I know more about AI than poetry, and I use genAI as a kind of intelligent thesaurus, but genNI poetry-as-process is sufficiently pleasing and personally useful that it can count even to a novice poet like me as one answer to “what is the purpose of poetry”. There is no such purpose for the machine.
I know I’ve not said anything new about poetry, but I think we’re not remotely ready for the new world of LLMs (and whatever will soon supersede it), and it may be helpful when people who feel the magic of genAI smack it back a bit from a perspective of love and awe.