Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a personal project in which I try to draft a list of things that AI cannot replace with ease — a humanity conservation project, if you will. Of all the items on that rather short list, poetry both excites and worries me the most. In an age where poetry is consumed primarily through short-form content of nature with yellow serif font, and the average attention span of a college student is shorter than most printed poems, we are indeed in a heap of trouble. I was even more alarmed when I saw the latest installation at the Hopkins Center for the Arts: Being, a 30-foot-tall humanoid artificial intelligence that “represents a Griot — a West African storyteller, poet and oral historian,” according to the Hopkins Center’s website.
One of the events offered with Being is a poetry drop-in session. The last thing I want is to have poetry delivered to me by a 30-foot-tall humanoid AI that uses they/them pronouns. I considered writing an article about the impending and unavoidable doom that comes from giving AI personal pronouns, but perhaps words are better spent elsewhere. To have AI produce poetry and call it art is a terrible disservice to poetry at large. Poetry has always been a deeply human endeavor, and it must remain that way.
Why do we read or write poetry? As John Keating famously put it, we do so because “we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion.” Poetry exists because humans feel things they cannot otherwise explain, and because the feeling of being understood by another person across time and space is one of the few genuinely irreplaceable experiences life offers.
Poetry stems from deeply human experiences of disturbance, suffering, pain and love. Those emotions cannot be trained. There is imperfection in poetry, where there exist lines that don’t quite scan, images that shouldn’t work but do and the poem you return to at 30that meant something entirely different to you when you were 17. Reading it is not the same as listening to it or performing it. Poetry is shared. It is someone telling you that they feel you, that they share what you feel. It is, at its best, proof that you are not alone in whatever it is you are carrying.
Being cannot offer this. While it can, and will, generate formally competent verse, the best adjective that I could ever offer would be ‘well-trained.’ It has never loved someone it shouldn’t have. It has never sat with a loss it couldn’t articulate. It has never needed poetry the way people need poetry, which is to say, desperately, and in the dark. The Griot tradition that Being claims to inhabit is one of the oldest and most sacred forms of human expression. It is a tradition built on memory, on community, on the particular weight of a people’s history carried in one person’s voice. It was not born in a product pitch. You cannot train it into existence. To assign that mantle to a machine, however well-intentioned, is not innovation. It is at best a misunderstanding of what the tradition is, and at worst, a spectacular act of hubris.
There is something worth examining in why Being exists at all, and why it takes the shape it does. A 30-foot humanoid. A Griot. A poetry drop-in session. These are not arbitrary choices. They are choices designed to make a machine feel human, culturally significant and meaningful. We know, somewhere, that what AI produces lacks something. So we dress it up. We give it pronouns and a tradition and an imposing physical form and we call it art and hope that the scale of the thing distracts us from the absence at its center. It will not, if we are paying attention.
A poetry drop-in session with Being is not the end of the world. It is not, in isolation, a catastrophe, but it is a symptom of something that deserves more scrutiny than it tends to get: the slow, well-meaning, thoroughly modern project of replacing human experience with a convincing simulation of it and calling that progress. Poetry has survived a great deal. It will probably survive Being. However, every time we suggest that a machine can do what a poet does, we make it a little easier to forget why it mattered that a human did it in the first place.
The next time you feel the pull of a poetry session with a 30-foot AI, find instead the most human person you know and ask them to read you something they love. Watch their face while they do it. That is the part no one has figured out how to install.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
