Early in April, Maeve and I got a rideshare home from a poetry reading and the young driver wanted to chat. He asked where we'd been and when I mentioned poetry he took the opening to extol one of his side hustles: "It must be so much easier to write poetry these days, with AI. I'm going to write 100 children's books with ChatGPT this year. I have them on Amazon." I don't encounter this type of guy in the wild much, keeping as I do to my friendly sensitive bubble of artsy nerds who are concerned with both the plagiarism aspect and the environmental impacts of consumer AI, among other qualms. I was too surprised and/or courteous to have an argument with a stranger doing gig labor for me so I was just like, well, I guess that depends on what your goals are with your writing. Good luck with your passive bilingual babies’ Bible story income, my dude, please don’t make it my problem in any way shape or form ever.

Because I used to find procedurally generated text to be a fun tool for writing differently and expanding my voice, and because, well, Online, I’ve thought about this interaction a lot. Hence, an email, a bit of l’esprit de escalier inspired by this man who, I think it’s safe to assume, shan’t ever read my good cool thoughts about why the outputs of the corporate-controlled large language models have no place in the poems I want to write or read.

There are differences in both degree and kind between the @horse_ebooks and TalkToTransformer poems I made and "writing" via chatbot prompt. (Hello and thanks to everyone who's stuck around on this very 'sletter since the No Experiences days).

In degree, because only a scrap of generated writing is in those poems. Not having looked at No Experiences in a hot minute I had a brief fear I wouldn’t recall where I ended and the spam horse began, but of course I do. (Phew.)

In kind, because I believe the output of a corporate software package is not in and of itself art. To quote a notable probably Bluesky-borne shitpost that I can’t be bothered to trace to its source, “a computer can never be spiteful or horny, so a computer can never make art.” (Don't @ me if whoever wrote this has since been milkshake ducked. Anyone can be right about one thing.)

I clarify what I think and believe by writing it out. I'm doing it right now. Making May Day protest signs with a group of strangers who brought up AI in the classroom, I said something like: embodiment and community are necessary for artmaking, and since LLMs categorically cannot experience embodiment or community, they cannot make art. (Which is a nicer way of saying a computer can never be spiteful/horny, etc.) When Cory Arcangel shows us the clouds, that’s art. He had the idea; it came from his life and his skills. If I prompted Midjourney or Sora or whatever to do the same, it wouldn’t be, at least not without many other contextual elements unique and innate to my singular wild and precious human life.

And so, when Taylor Johnson writes “I made it up” in the two final lines of “TRANS IS AGAINST NOSTALGIA," I have a powerful emotional response: these words were carried from his body boat to mine on a page. O New Day, indeed! I wouldn’t ever want to feel this way about a chatbot’s hallucinated text, no matter what it made up.

I love this poem and the whole book it’s published in. I love that poets keep rowing against the slop currents. Keep going, poets. I see y’all. You have my oars and my swords.

Anyway and also, I got published!

Two poems I wrote in spring 2020 are in the new issue of a neat local publication, the Milwaukee Avenue Messenger. They’re about birds, trees, and that liminal moment where we had to look our neighbors in the eyes above our cloth masks at our six-foot distances because we didn’t know what else there was to do. You can read them right here. I’ll try and remember to send another quick missive for my Chicago folks if and when the release party/reading happens. In the meantime, I'm biking into the future and/or the pasture, hoping and working for it to be kinder when I get there.

yours, humanly and humanely, Erin