Public Writing

Poetry and AI: LLMs as (Surrealist) Poetic Machines

Lecture · Poesiæuropa · 2024

ChatGPT is very good at writing bad poetry.

ChatGPT is very good at writing bad poetry because what it does is an extreme case of automatic writing — a splendid case of Breton’s hasard objectif.

AI is supposed to have everything to do with intelligence and not much to do with poetry. Following Matteo Pasquinelli and Dennis Tenen, and going beyond them, the talk argues that these machines have less to do with intelligence than with the creative and literary side of human and non-human life — and that their products are closer to an incredibly complex cadavre exquis than to what we call rational thought.

It ends on a question rather than a claim: whether these machines, as poetic machines in the avant-garde tradition, are trying to teach us how to think, or rather how to, one day, finally stop.

Where: Poesiæuropa 2024, Isola Polvese, 3–8 June 2024
On: Breton’s hasard objectif, automatic writing, sampling and probability

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