Why AI cannot write poetry
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
That urban legend (or not) when Hemingway won a story competition in 6 words:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
This is a post about how Rilke predicted in 1910 on what it would take to write a single good verse and where you can AI-generate your own poem portrait. Here lies a juxtaposition of the creative reality.
All in favor of a human experience say Aye.
It seems that AI is everywhere, it permeates every other conversation, every other email. Some think it’s the best thing since sliced bread and will help the humanity solve its worst problems. Others argue it’ll destroy humanity, the independence of thought, creativity and erase complete industries.
Obviously, I have my own opinion and experience on how AI personally affects me and the process of creativity. As I delved into more research, journaled on what the soul and extent of creativity are and what AI can or cannot replicate, I have come across two completely opposite poetry experiences, a juxtaposition of sorts: a collective poem generated by AI with the help of humans and a poem by Rilke from 1910.
I’ll be honest, I was excited to try out the AI generated poem engine. That with my one sleight of hand aka typing (donating) just one unique word into the prompter, AI will do its magic and make me a real poet. I hoped that I found a secret shortcut to writing beautiful prose. It was done by one of most creative artists and stage designers in the world, Es Devlin, whose exhibitions and installations usually take my breath away*. Not so fast. Not a poet yet.
I found a collective poemportrait experience driven by AI leaving me feeling rather flat and disappointed, though it has a great premise and promise.
Here is my AI-generated poem that used my donated word “myriad”:
“That myriad songs are entertained in the moonlight, The eclipse of the darkness of the sun.”
It took 2 seconds. What do you think it meant to the AI to put those words together?
You can try it here yourself, and let me know what you’ll get.
Try your own Poemportraits here
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And now, the curtain rises and we see Rilke. I promise I wasn’t expecting Rilke in 1910 to verbalize so eloquently why AI cannot write poetry, but here we are. He’s a wizard with words after all. I imagine him bowing after he finished reciting this to a standing ovation.
For the sake of a single verse
…Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply feelings (one has feelings early enough)— they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and knows the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.
You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.
You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories.
You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, “For the Sake of a Single Verse”
There you have it.
AI can write poetry in 2 seconds but it will leave you flat. And your most painful or beautiful verse could take ten years to manifest and there’ll be humans who’ll cry reading those precious words.
All in favor of a human experience say Aye.
If you have ever written a poem that it is still waiting to be read by someone else, please share it, I’d love to read it. Because I know it will make me feel things, because it’s real…
Thank you for your presence here and being a witness to my creative journey 🌸
with love,
Diana
p.s. And remember: “Seek JOY in Every Season”
p.p.s *Es Devlin is a fantastic artist and stage designer, and I’ll be writing more about her amazing installations in a later post (especially the one I saw recently in Milan).