Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology: D
Abstract
2022 has been heralded as the year of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, along with a host of others, launched late in the year and immediately disrupted the status quo of the literary and art worlds, leading to outcries to ban “AI Art” and spawning an entirely new market of NFTs. Fears over the “death of the artist” and the “death of college composition,” however, are unfounded when considering the historical adoption of emerging technologies by creatives and the reconsideration of authorship that began with post structuralism and the Foucauldian Death of the Author in 1967. Contemporary scholarship has faced challenges in reconciling the function of the human author in conjunction with artificial intelligence (AI) due to the progressive sophistication and selfsufficiency of generative code. Nonetheless, it is erroneous to establish the threshold for authorship based on the development or advancement of AI or robotics, as it falls within the realm of ontology. Instead, assertions of AI authorship stem from a romanticized perception of both authorship and AI during a period in which neither holds significance. A new discussion on the role of the human agent in the writing process, particularly in the creative process like poetry, should prioritize the practical aspects of what an author does. This study examines how AI is increasingly becoming involved in collaborative efforts to create poetry and aims to explore the potential of this trend. Furthermore, the study seeks to provide empirical evidence on the boundaries of AI's ability to replicate human thought and experience. Through generating content in the creative written arts using ChatGPT-3, poetry analysis revealed that, in fact, such new generative models can imitate the vocabulary, language choices, style, and even rhythm of famous poets such as Keats, it is unable to generate emotions that it has not experienced. The questions that will continue to be raised on the nature of humanity, existence, and creative capabilities should be reframed with the concept of fear fore grounded to assist in understanding the uniquely human anxiety and drive to create in an attempt to communicate across the gulf what it “feels” like to be human as a phenomenology of experience.
Publication Date
4-2023
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Hutson, James and Schnellmann, Ana, "The Poetry of Prompts: The Collaborative Role of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Creation of Poetry and the Anxiety of Machine Influence" (2023). Faculty Scholarship. 462.
https://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/faculty-research-papers/462