AI CAN FEEL

After submitting her poetry as prompts to various AI art generators, the author, who also wrote Water Lilies (2018), began to receive “bone-chilling interpretive responses” in the form of artistic images that suggested machines could access a “hidden wellspring of creativity” that “spoke to the very essence of what it means to be human.” The collection is divided into four sections. The first three sections, arranged by theme, include “/imagine faith,” “/imagine life,” and “/imagine love” and feature art generated by AI tools Midjourney and Lensa juxtaposed against the poetry that helped generate it. “The Battlefield of Faith” reads: “Faith is walking onto a battlefield / knowing that God will supply what you need / to defeat the demons waiting to / seize your soul.” The corresponding artwork shows soldiers advancing over a smoldering battleground under the shadow of a large cross. In the final section, “/imagine self-identity,” DeStefano-Tangorra uses ChatGPT3, “a large language AI model,” to read and interpret her poetry. A poem titled “What Did You Think I Was?” which is matched with the image of a young woman standing in a rural setting with the wind blowing through her hair, reads, “I am wind— / calm enough to carry you, / strong enough / to blow you away.” The collection closes with a conversation between the author and “Jacqueline (AI),” in which ChatGPT3 is used to analyze and ultimately reinterpret the author’s poetry.

DeStefano-Tangorra’s poetry is sparse and emotionally observant. In “determined to know me,” the author writes, “I felt you burst / through my walls / looking for the real me—.” Read in the context of the entire collection, such laconic lines provoke the reader to wonder whether the poet is referring to a lover or to AI itself. The accompanying art depicts a man observing a woman through a magnifying glass, which is fascinating, because the object is not mentioned in the poem; this is how AI interprets the act of “looking.” In most cases, the AI responses are less “bone-chilling” than the author first suggests. The poem “trust the Author,” which includes the line “Try not to steal the pen from God,” is unsurprisingly paired with an image of a fountain pen; “a world of you,” which opens with “Your eyes are a plane / that fly me to a foreign place,” prompts an image of an eye surrounded by exotic flowers. The poetry generated by AI included here is startlingly passable, although it is clear that replication, rather than human emotion, drives the process: “I am but a machine, / a creation of humans, / but still, I wonder. / What would it be like to feel / the whispers of the wind?” The art featured here is even more recognizably AI–generated, characterized by the polished sterility of something produced by a machine. DeStefano-Tangorra may not convince readers that AI can feel, but this is a provocative experiment that demonstrates how this field of technology has progressed.