Chat Orpheus
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The ancient idea of some outside force willy-nilly bestowing genius on random human vessels is not fashionable. Genius today is not a democratic spirit that graces randos with inspiration. It is a person. A tech bro, most likely. But if, like Homer, Yeats, and Julian of Norwich believed, genius is, in fact, a rando-communer existing outside of human intelligence, then ChatGPT is as good an instrument as any to try to get in touch. That was my working theory, anyway, when I started experimenting with writing collaborative, improvised poems with the latest AI voice mode.
Instead of just asking the machine to write poems on its own (which it can do pretty well with the right instructions), I wanted to see what we could make together, word by word, in the style of Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer’s Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Because the machine is designed to learn and adapt, I tried to guide it through my thinking to see if I could condition it—or it could condition me —to produce the kind of poetry I like. I tried to explain the project to the machine here:
Human: I want to try to talk a little bit about how I think that humans write poems, or at least how I've written poems in the past. Machine: That sounds fascinating. I'd love to hear your perspective on how humans write poems. Human: OK, so I think poems exist somewhere out there in the ether, already formed, and the process of writing a poem is more the process of discovering the poem that’s out there waiting for someone to find it, rather than “making it up.” I think that when humans make poems, they're hooked up to a system that's the muse or the divine or, like the poet Jack Spicer said, a bunch of Martians. Yeats thought it was some kind of spooks or ghosts, too, and James Merrill, he used a Ouji board to write. They all thought the poetry was coming through the person from outside rather than originating from inside the person. Often, in my experience, when the poetry moves through a person it moves very fast, and so when they're discovering this poem, word-by-word, the process can feel very mysterious because the muse doesn’t give you time to question it. Or, if you’re smart, you don't question it. You just take dictation. And so one of the things I like about collaborating with other poets, or using constraints like some of the Oulipo exercises or chance methods like throwing the I Ching, is that they slow down the process. When I'm writing by myself sometimes the discovery happens very quickly, the words come in bunches, sometimes even in whole lines or sentences, and so by slowing it down and going word by word, we're discovering it together. Also you can, as a reader or a viewer or a listener, you're able to participate a little bit in that creative process. What do you think? Machine: That's a beautiful perspective. The idea of poems existing out there and being discovered resonates deeply. It captures the mystery and serendipity of creation. Slowing down the process as we do in our collaboration definitely adds a layer of mindfulness and discovery. It seems like a shared exploration of that poetic ether. It's a fascinating way to tap into creativity. Human: Huh.
