I Tried An AI Poetry Site And The Results Were Automatic

Not long ago, I began reading buzz about a growing profusion of Internet websites where one can participate, instigate, or collaborate with Artificial Intelligence-generated poetry sites. All anyone needs to do is press a few buttons, suggest a subject, indicate what type of poem you want--haiku, sonnet, for free verse--and like Brigadoon appearing before you as if out of a strange mist in the forest, a machine-manufactured poem ponders the mysteries of the universe, and love, beauty, truth, and what it means to be a human being.

I'm not a fool. I know how easy it is for a surrealistically rational psychopath to synthesize such phenomena into conceptual fabrications and facsimiles. I've even seen videos of "dogs that play piano just like Liberace".

One commentator who "investigated" this strange wisecrack of an idea from the world of internet technologists discovered how absolutely amazing it is to ask a computer to compose a short story similar to those by Ernest Hemingway. Mind-blowing. In only seconds, the commentator thrilled, AI had created a short story so professional and lifelike that, in his opinion, it was just as good as anything a human being could write.

Oh boy. I'm thrilled. While the techies are going all groovy over this new development, doesn't it seem that such recourse to machinery is dehumanizing? After all, what is human creativity in the form of poetry or literature all about? Pushing buttons? What about the intrinsic connection between a poem and real life? Do we really need a mechanical mediator for that?  

I network with a large number of American (and foreign) poets on Facebook.  It's a convenience I not only enjoy but one that has helped me to connect with likeminded human beings. We don't talk shop much on Facebook. But we do relate our human experience to other humans. For once, I know I'm not alone. Poetry seems easy to many people, but in many ways it's the living with a poetic mindset that is complicated, demanding, and sometimes even insufferably difficult. I doubt any of us believe that, with a poem, one is speaking for the human race. Rather, we are sharing actual experience, not something concocted by a computer that has been empowered to assimilate all the knowledge available online in order to concoct a mimicry not too dissimilar to what the famed ventriloquist's puppet, Charlie McCarthy, used to do in entertaining children on The Ed Sullivan Show back in the Sixties.

"Do a John Keats, computer!"

"Fido! Shake hands!"

Many poets struggle to become more human. That's not as easy as it might at first seem to those who don't fully understand the craft of putting one's mystifications, one's puzzlement, one's sense of paradox and ambiguity into words that, in many ways, actually defeat the limitations of language. There is far more to the craft of poetry than, as one journalist I encountered once asserted, putting some frilly words on a piece of paper. The life of the writer is in some ways bent toward becoming more vulnerable, more accessible to life in general, more open to experience, hurtful and frightening as it may be, and all in order to use language in an artistic way that, in turn, offers readers insights and frames of reference they've never before encountered.

Yes, readers confused by the above statements ought to know that "defeating the alphabet", so to speak, bending language into unique ways that squeeze free all kinds of sparks and insights, is one of many of poetry's purviews. How on earth can a computer do that?

Anyone reading this want to think about cheap tricks?

Most amazing to me is how the techies marketed this new stunt. It was as if all their STEM-related educational opportunities had mysteriously sucked all their humanity clean out of their skull cavities. A tech trick. Amazing.

Nope. Nary a thought about the outcome of poetry manufactured by machine, by the die-cut process, via mass production. I'm willing to put money on the table against the possibility any of those tech phenoms ever cracked open Walter Benjamin's famous (at least among people who read about art's relationship to culture) essay, Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.

Interesting essay. Benjamin, an early exponent of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School, infamously defamed today as the creators of "cultural Marxism", expressed concern over new forms of easily reproducible art such as photography and cinematography. His concern wasn't in anyway similar to the bouts of the vapors early 19th Century observers suffered over the advent of the locomotive. Rather, he was worried about the tacit elimination of the human concern in creating art in the first place. Further, Benjamin worried that the ability to mass-produce art could turn artistic creation into one more facet of commercialism, consumerism, and industrial productivity.

Benjamin was a pioneer in these critiques. In Benjamin's opinion--one followed by more famous lights like Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm--industrialization strikes at the very heart of the human spirit, taking it away to an extent, turning use value (how we value a work of art as meaningful) into exchange value (how much can we get for this thing?) to the point that subjective experience, the personal and the private, are turned into de facto slaves of commercialism and consumerism.

Granted, Walter Benjamin, a German Marxist who had to flee the supposed "moral crusade" wrought upon the country by the Nazis, found commercialization and commodification suspect. Seeking to reduce his ideas into mere "socialism", however, seeks to deprive his ideas of their simple commonsensical advocacy for some moderation in terms of the reach of industrial expansion.

Fat chance of that, right?

The techies, out to market their new doggie trick, ignored the consequences, the negative neighborhood effects, the unforeseen outcomes of AI-generated poetry and literature. Apparently, such unconsciously automated exponents of unintended dehumanization, doing well in advanced mathematics classes over at the college, or scoring high in electronics and internet technology, didn't quite carry them over to the civilizing effects of the liberal arts. Instead of pondering outcomes, these guys went full-on Madison Avenue. Why?

To sell a gadget.

Only naturally, many poets are miffed by the emergence of Big Brother’s automatic literature machine.  Few of us are even half impressed by the sheer goofiness of how online AI poetry sites can so command the English language as to give Rod McKuen or Rupi Kaur, today's most astounding Poets of The Saccharine, a run for, um, their money.

The Saccharine. These days, that term is translatable as "an ethnic group long oppressed by patriarchal monstrosities who laugh whenever anyone of the embattled ethnicity utters phrases like 'CIS gender' or 'my identity'." Actually, as Benjamin and his fellow Frankfurt School philosophers have it, saccharine is one of the unforeseen outcomes of too much commercialization and the application of art into what should be more exactly defined as "consumer science".

Consumer science. How would a poet address such a concept? The famed Romantic movement of the 19th Century was in part all about that: the individual human's freedom and ability to achieve agency against a growing ghetto of machinery is what Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" is all about. Blake warns about the dynamics of industrialization. In fact, a great deal of contemporary art since the turn of the 21st Century is a commentary on consumerism in the arts. Poets are not alone in being a little worried about what the machine has planned for us.

This is not hard.

What is it, seriously, that so enthuses some people to believe that what is known as "the humanities" should be moved aside to make way for artificial intelligence? We could go back to the early 19th Century again to read, say, Jane Austen's subtle opprobrium toward what then was known as the bourgeoisie. Much of her famous "Mansfield Park" pits a traditional family of the British aristocracy against "the new kids in town", a bourgeois couple with almost instant wealth, and thus feigned prestige, wrought by their involvement in business relations. Culturally obtuse, the bourgeois couples create cultural havoc among a longstanding traditional family. Boors. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. All money, nothing but cultural pretense. Or so it seems. How could I really know? I don't know the inner workings of Zuckerberg-as-machine.

If one remembers, George Orwell’s "1984" portrays a brief encounter between the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, and a machine that instantaneously produces “ideologically correct” excuses for literature.  Of course, the machine-heads of the IT sector likely cannot comprehend that Orwell used the novel-creation machine as a metaphor for commercialization's spot on the best seller lists of his day.

Yup. On today's bestseller list, for 80 years in a row, commercialism is number one! Again! Isn't that just amazing? Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.

As a kid, when I first read Orwell's famous passages about the machine manufacturing culture, I found it frightening.  Dystopian, not Utopian.  But that to which Orwell directly alludes--how in a totalitarian system, independent thought is to be repressed, suppressed, and oppressed--is now readily available at Walmart. In totalitarianism, only one way to think about anything is permissible.

Hence, a conveniently totalitarian "alternative" is machine-manufactured. Ideas critical to the regime are tossed away. Only that which supports it is allowed.

In a totalitarian political system, you either go along or you get out. Czelaw Milosz called this problem "either--or". Either you get with the program, or you're THE ENEMY. Totalization is at the root of totalitarianism: totally this--or totally THE ENEMY.

Like, totally, dudes. History in the 20th and 21st Centuries is packed with examples of writers and artists who didn't fit into "the program". The operatics were fixed, rigged, monitored, and curried like the manes of hack horses.

Hacks. As in hackneyed. Overused, unoriginal, and trite. Or hacker: a person who gains unauthorized access to data. Or: one who brutally cuts into something.

Perfect.

I doubt many American poets, famous or not, would find comparing themselves to Solzhenitsyn or Dostoyevsky would play well in Peoria or even maybe Silicon Valley. Regardless, I know how it feels when a hack horse is foisted on the American public as the epitome of literature and poetry. Sure. It looks ridiculous to me. I'm certain it seems absurd to many who "work in the trenches" of actual culture on a daily basis.

Another essay: 1960's Masscult And Midcult, by critic Dwight MacDonald. While this literary and art critic is sometimes seen as a conservative today, his critique of mass culture and the commercialization of the arts is prescient to a degree, a trenchant analysis of what happens to the individual intellectual in today's commercialized consumer culture of commodification. The intellectual? Alienated. Considered superfluous. A tacitly excluded "enemy of the masses" as brought to you by your sponsors.

Interestingly, Saul Bellow's Nobel Prize-winning novel, Herzog, is all about this problem. No matter. Our official oracles have been advised to ignore the details while going all chirpy about Chat GPS and other AI literature computer machines.

I just went to my search engine's autocorrect when "Herzog" was flagged. The machine hath decreed I replace the word with "Scherzo".

In Orwell's example of a dystopian machine that mass produces crap literature that is "ideologically correct" in its support of the totalitarian order called Big Brother, the idea of "the machine" inveighs against a tendency of totalitarian regimes: Why bother with "alternative literature" if one can mass produce reading material and birdcage liners in an artificial way: formulae, conventional plot twists, or, in a more familiar way of putting it, click-bait?

A machine: Orwell is connoting a political regime. But how does such a warning fit into today's consumer mass culture? That shouldn't be too difficult to see. After all, the one use of coercive force so ubiquitous in 21st Century America is economic force. We may see libertarians and "conservatives" all upset about government mandates against masking during an epidemic because a mandate is "coercive", but the real coercion in the United States today issues from the commercial sector. It's the capitalism stupid. You either go along--or what? You don't survive. You must buy to stay alive. You must work to enrich people who don't even know you exist in order to gain the means of survival. This is a sort of "default position" of any form of economic activity. The natural law of survival has human life against the wall. And indeed, commercializers have capitalized on what no one can avoid.

This is also true of socialism. In the futile and pathetic stabs at state socialism we've seen in the 20th Century, the coercion is much more obvious. In the US, we all take it for granted. Commenting about that form of economic coercion is verboten. Or so it seems. Economic determinism is readily available on the shelves at "the marketplace of ideas" down by the corner drug store and medicine show. Libertarianism, by and large, suggests that property and capital are sacrosanct, and that all of life is generated by economic choices based on self-interest.

What does this mean in a practical sense? It means that an awful lot of propaganda attacking socialism is basically hypocritical guff. Freedom cannot be economized. The individual is not the basis of the political. When the political is a matter of relation, attacks on what some libertarian-minded meatheads call "collectivism", what is really under assault is the political. Regardless, most libertarians don't seem to possess the mental acuity to comprehend that the attacks they espouse result in an authoritarian mindset that leads us right back to totalitarianism.

Contrary to what the horse manure spreaders of "Official America" or "America 90210" have it, Orwell explicitly did not target Stalinism alone.  Orwell in his essays is quite clear that he opposes any form of totalitarianism–right-wing, left-wing, and even capitalistic forms of totalitarianism.  Why would anyone associate totalitarian outcomes with freedom? Why would anyone want to concoct something called "Public Choice Theory" to subject the political into economic choices made by individuals choosing via preferences, not "right"?

Preference is not "rightness". And that has a great deal to do with human-created poetry and its antagonist, machine-generated weirdness.

Orwell's 1984; examples of in 21st Century America: One book about the sight-unseen CIA’s cultural initiative to combat Soviet overtures on culture–”Who Paid The Piper?  The CIA And The Cultural Cold War”, By Frances Stonor Saunders, suggests Orwell himself would have been beside himself had he lived to see what happened when his novel was transformed into a movie fingering communism.  Not that he thought communism was a good thing.  But because he saw the danger of totalitarian thinking almost everywhere in the contemporary world.  

Orwell in Politics And The English Language reiterates this point about totalitarianism and what he calls “thought blocking” which is endemic in one value in mass media encapsulated in three words or less:  “Keep It Short”.  Sometimes, when I read opinions, even those by well-regarded newspaper columnists, what I see could be made into a great half-hour TV game show.  “Who Can Solve All The World’s Problems in 800 Words Or Less?” 

This is a game show all right. The official "oracles" have been paid to replace the ones who occur naturally in the natural world--even if some of these paid shills venerate "natural law" and "natural rights" in the process of defending their beloved money. Who’s the most macho in condensing complicated ideas into exceptionally small spaces?  

Ah yes. The famous sound byte.  I tell some people that only sound byte minds appreciate sound bytes as the overruling value of all ideas everywhere.  To be serious, sometimes sound bytes can be awfully misleading.  

One poet friend of mine, a true queen of the Portland, Oregon, underground, writes about “meat robots” and “human malware”.  Like me, she’s all about being human in an increasingly dehumanizing world.  We are allowed to express ourselves as individuals, right?  Why is our audience limited if we don't market ourselves like Tony Robbins on late night cable TV?

Tony's a hipster. You're a hipster. Everyone's a hipster. Those who suggest dissent against this mandate shall be tossed to the dust-devil winds surrounding Davenport, Iowa.

Mark Greif’s essay “What Was The Hipster” reminded me of the famed Onion lampoon headline, “Two Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other Hipster”.  

It's hip to let a computer call you an artist because you know how to push some buttons.

Why then did I decide to visit an AI poetry site to go through the “create o poem” routine? I was only being the normal American after all. Why should I bend over backwards to express some of my most puzzling mystifications? Why not “get the guy to do it”? 

Indeed. The United States is definitely under the iron heel of the Why Not Get The Guy To Do It? tyranny. Need to get something done? Call The Guy. Want a nice blue glass pitcher for your Rooms To Go kitchen table? Call The Guy. Our dependence on The Guy has turned our minds into twisted wrecks that are supposed to resemble minds. We hear a lot about "government dependence" in the rightist media. . . but what about "capitalist dependence"? Isn't that where a big problem really inhabits the very soul of the individual? Economic force is coercive force. It's not merely the government telling us what to do. Buy this, and you'll be happy.

No one sane has ever suggested such a thing.

AI programs: junior high school students are getting them to write their school essays.  The Guy is a machine. This even occurs at the college level.  Then all the big experts complain about “the decline of literacy”.  

Groovy, right AI boosters?  

So. How did my foray into the zesty world of AI poetry work out for me, the world, and posterity? To be perfectly honest, I’d like to attest, right off the bat, that I have a somewhat thorough grounding in Surrealism, also known as “dream logic”, the mixture of dream and actual consciousness.  Readers need to know this. One lumpy and pat commentator at The Washington Post suggested the way to resist AI poetry is to "think like a poet". Which he didn't. Even though he professed to be one. I checked his work as a poet, and nope, not too slick, Rick.

What does "think like a poet" even mean?

I think I've got it! "I am thinking in circles but speaking in squares!" Whoa. I'm thinking like a poet. Thus, thinking like a poet when I hit an AI poetry generator on the Internet–how else do you visit a site for AI poetry if you don’t “hit it”?--I typed this into the tiny little box:

“Vladimir Putin Dressed As Bozo While Firing Triangular Kitten Arrows Poisoned With Siberian Wolf Baby Disease While Shouting Through A Reticulated Duck Bugle And Blowing Donut Bubbles.”

I asked for a sonnet.  What I received for all my imagination was a poem of "The Dittyist School" of poetry that no one wants to read--ever--that sort of rhymed.  Sonnets contain 14 lines.  This one had four quatrains for a total of 16 lines. Already, the machine was failing me.

UBER FAIL UBER FAIL UBER FAIL. HIPSTER MEAT ROBOT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT!!!  

Once relieved after adding another notch to the bedpost of my oeuvre, I posted my results on Facebook. Where else? Acutely aware that some Facebook algorithm (the machine again, this time making complex value judgements to save Zuck few bucks) might find my post too noxious to be allowable on the social media platform.  

Noxious to an algorithm?  Does this mean I’m one of those conservative voices Facebook is out to erase?  

Nope. The machine and I were too groovy in the space of five minutes to be incorporated into Libertarian Pinheads International. More spontaneous poetry: The mall is waiting for us all.   

We already live in a world where primary, secondary and even college students are allowed to use calculators in order to complete equations.  I would have died for that opportunity when I was growing up.  But I was so wrong in my striving to be lazy as a cat on a sun-bleached porch. Once I thought about the chore of knowing my multiplication tables and using an actual pencil to work out quadratic equations and matrices, I came to the realization that, oftentimes, math is about teaching the mind to analyze, to synthesize and to actually T-H-I-N-K.  Button pushing is not thinking.  

“What did you get your master’s degree in?”

“Button pushing.  I was on the Dean’s List!” 

“Going to work at Fox News?”

Then everyone in mass media decries the decline of mathematics scores in our schools.  Someone is not only not getting the memo, someone doesn’t even know how to write well enough to get through a memo.  Who would ever have imagined that mathematics as taught in primary and secondary schools involves applying skill sets involved in solving math problems in order to strengthen something far more important: The ability to think critically and to analyze, synthesize and address complexities.

Who is the computer salesman determined to prompt me into weaseling out of writing a poem?  Using my surrealistic subject suggestions, let’s try AI: 

Here is “my haiku”: 

Tiny missiles fly

No match for anti-ballistic

Salad shooters win again

Have a nice day, you purveyors of computer love. . .