‘AI Bullshit’ Makes Poets Mad
When the conceptual poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram began to experiment with large language models (LLMs) in 2018, they discovered unexpected poetry inside ChatGPT-2. “The prompt responses were quirky: prone to interesting conversations and uncanny and poetic slippages. There was a strangeness about them,” they wrote in the introduction to their new AI poetry collection, A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content.
“The responses made you feel like someone was maybe looking over your shoulder, or the machine had read your horoscope or your diary, like it just knew things,” wrote the poet, who uses they/them pronouns.
On July 29, 2023, when Bertram announced on Twitter that they had won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAMÂ chapbook contest for a poetry collection “generated” by ChatGPT-3, there was immediate backlash.
This outcome—that a book written by AI would defeat honest books carved from the hearts and souls of living poets—is the stuff of writers’ nightmares.
Novelist, professor, and book critic Gabino Iglesias tweeted in response to the contest results, “Someone told me about this and I was like ‘Nah, can’t be.’ Well, apparently it is. Imagine working you [sic] ass off and then losing to an ‘AI chapbook.’ I hope the submission call asked specifically for AI bullshit.” (It did not.)
Iglesias’ tweet garnered replies such as, “This just makes me saddened and angry at the same time if that makes sense,” and “I hope the check bounces when she tries to cash it. I can’t believe this is where we’re at right now.” (The cash prize is $1,000, presumably generated by the contest’s $25 entry fee.)
Past literary controversies—over adult novels such as American Dirt or Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-canceled Russian novel The Snow Forest, or young adult novels such as The Black Witch—have centered on the “harm” these novels pose to marginalized or victimized groups. In the case of Bertram’s poetry collection, the alleged harm was against other creative writers.
As much as writers feel that AI poses an existential threat to their work, the real competition they face is each other. There are too many creative writers, produced by too many creative writing MFA programs (there are over 250), all competing for crumbs of prestige, glimmers of significance.
Bertram is one of few creative writers using AI as a tool
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