Technology in the world of Poetry and Literature
I came across this much talked about ad on YouTube, a few days ago. What was so special about this ad? The commercial was written by IBM’s Watson, a supercomputer for Lexus with minimal human intervention. Since then there’s one question that has been hovering in my mind. With AI writing scripts and making its way into the creative world, will writers become dinosaurs in this world? And whether we will have the next Dickinson and Woolf coming out of an AI lab. These thoughts about extinction of my half identity was further sparked by an article in Vox about GPT-2, an AI system developed at OpenAI, a research lab started by Elon Musk. Guess what GPT-2 does? This system writes poetry!
As specifically stated in the article, the system has been trained by exposing data on the internet to predict the words and the writing style. It studies existing literature and poems to string new poetry. And that is also pretty much what we do in art schools and in literature classes. We study the timeless pieces of art to come up with our own prose and stories.
However, the fundamental difference lies in how AI approaches the existing work and how humans view the same. AI studies patterns and comes up with similar stuff without giving any unique voice whereas humans study art, history and literature not to absorb the past patterns but to dwell deeper into our own minds and find our own inspiration. And somewhere, in the process, we find our unique voices and learn how to integrate our personal experiences and our learning for our artistic pursuits. We blend our unique perspectives gathered by introspection into poetry and other such readings.
Art is a result of our imagination going to the unlikeliest of places; it is uncovering the unknown, searching for musings that haven’t been found yet. Art in any form expands our horizons and explores several schools of thoughts. In the process, it gives birth to beautiful poetry, music, stories and much more, showing us a new world, we have never known. So, isn’t writing poetry based on just existing literature counterfeiting the organic nature of art?
Also, our growth as an artist is often directly proportional to our personal growth. Our experiences, our evolving personalities and changing outlook of this world and of people around us make our experiences richer. Our pool of experiences then lends some of its own to translate our work as an artist.
I, then, wonder how will AI contribute to this another ephemeral and evolutionary nature of art. Will every upgrade of the AI system make way for compelling stories and heartbreakingly beautiful poems?
We all get swooned off by Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic letters. We all love to dwell into Charles Bukowski’s unconventional poetry. And to say that we are smitten by Khaled Hosseini’s soulful quotes is an understatement. One common thing among all these writers is their unique voice and their starkly unique experiences. If AI studies the patterns to determine the apt prose then how will we get another unique voice? How will we ever want to drown ourselves into poems that haven’t been birthed by experiences?
These questions and interrogations are not against technological advancements and nor do I frown upon the new world of Artificial Intelligence. It is certainly helping the human kind to make progress by leaps and bounds. However, for AI to survive in the world of art, it’s going to take much more than just studying patterns or imbibing structured and unstructured learning in its systems. Maybe, the day technology feels and endures the pain humankind has bestowed upon itself, will be the day when it can do true justice to the art of writing poetry.
