We really enjoyed this, something as far from AI as possible, written 30 years ago. And yet so relevant.
The big question: Can AI write poetry – that which illuminates our imagination, gives name to our feelings and experience?
I had just written something on experience and AI. Sensory, embodied experience doesn’t lend itself to description – which AI systems excel in – but it can be expressed in poetry: ‘as the revelation or distillation of experience’. Where AI stumbles is when it comes to emotion and affect. It can simulate or even predict them, but never experience them itself, just as it does not understand anything about language or meaning. By contrast, according to Lorde, poetry already exists within us humans.
Is there anything AI can do in this regard? Perhaps in supporting, prompting, even inspiring humans, through language, visual or aural outputs; one participant, however, was using generative AI to explicitly write poetry.
Lorde is speaking directly to and about women, and counterposing their hidden potential to traditional Eurocentric male culture. Here we noted the white ‘tech bro’ character of AI. ‘…imagination without insight’ doesn’t apply to all men, but we could certainly apply it to generative AI. In our ‘spatial intelligence’ work with AI, we don’t use the terms ‘insight’ or ‘understanding’ regarding AI, and recognise that it can only simulate these qualities, while recognising its brute-force descriptive power in scrutinising many more things, more deeply than any single human.
Regarding poetry, Lorde says that it ‘gives name to the nameless’, and here we can make only the most superficial comparison with AI, in that it will always give you an answer, attempting at least to name what might be nameless. While its language might be banal, do humans have the words to accurately describe our feelings? Here is the urgency of poetry – the ‘skeleton architecture of our lives’.
If imagination can be translated into ideas we can comprehend and share, how about then transforming this into action? Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it is forever possible. It’s easy to back down due to societal structures that work against us – pushing us and our technologies to ever more rational, empirical, practical and productive ends. More broadly, can we create lasting change, not just reacting or moving to a temporary position?
Lorde contrasts the ‘white fathers’ telling us ‘I think, therefore I am’ with ‘I feel, therefore I can be free’. This is echoed by many philosophers, including Gramsci, who found a kind of liberation even in prison; or others who find it in dreams – which remain our own and remain free, for now. We also discussed Avicenna’s thought experiment ‘The Floating Man’ (sexism noted) in which an individual is born but without senses or limbs – what does he know? Only that he exists. Existence being a precursor to thought, this reverses the wisdom: I am, therefore I think. We might note here that Avicenna was not exactly one of those white European philosophers, in fact was known as Ibn Sina in his native Middle East. Lorde indeed echoes this: ‘Our children cannot dream unless they live’. What male philosophers consider their children?
‘Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas,’ Lorde writes. ‘The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free.’ There’s AI. ‘But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out.’ AI has collected those old ideas to make new combinations etc, but it is within ourselves that they are transformed into action. And ‘there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real’.
‘For within structures by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.’ And if poetry has become merely a luxury, ‘we give up the future of our worlds.’
Is there a way out? (Is there an outside?) We discussed how we are pushing for ways of using AI – asking questions instead of answering them, for example. The fear of AI is not that it becomes as smart as us, but we become as dumb as it. In this way, it could be seen as (overt or unwitting) oppression.
Yes, even using AI to write poetry: ‘Your intention has to be clear,’ as one of our participants said.