party crasher

you shall know a word by the company it keeps - John Firth

Did you know that machine learning can identify words that are often linked metaphorically? If you’re a poet, you have already grasped the implication.

A writer can speed up the process of creating a poem by using AI to identify potential metaphors.

Should such a writer acknowledge the use of AI in creating the forementioned poem if it only helped? Or is that like using a thesaurus and not worth mentioning?

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp took a porcelain urinal and named it Fountain. His contention was that as an artist, he possessed the authority to classify an ordinary object as art.

This begged the question, how do we define art in the modern era? Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism followed in the wake of Duchamp’s pronouncement and continued to redefine the boundaries of art.

One hundred years give or take later, if I give instructions to an AI art program and after five or fifty of its attempts, I declare its final effort art and then print, frame and sell it am I a creator or something lesser?

I certainly would have put more effort into the creative process than Duchamp did with Fountain. But is that enough?

If I reframe my earlier question by asking what if I’m using an AI poetry generator and provide it with specific instructions and after it generates one hundred different poems, I select my favorite or mix and match lines and then post it on Vocal, am I a poet or something lesser? A discerning reader perhaps?

Before my loyal readers begin tossing bric-a-brac at their computer screens or winging their phones into nearby ponds, do not worry, I do not use AI for art or writing of any form. Hell, I don’t even use it for research.

But what happens when we can no longer tell the difference?

I’m just a messenger from a potential future asking questions. You may want to save your angry fusillades for when the future starts answering them.

I’m sure most if not all of you have received comments on your stories, articles and poetry that were whole or in part generated by AI. In the beginning, they were easy to ID because they were essentially cliff note explanations of the story.

But recently I received a couple AI comments that were far more sophisticated than what I had encountered before. In both cases I was able to identify the fraud because the program failed to decipher the difference between fantasy and reality or the grasp my use of metaphor.

Although the comments came from two different commenters, I'm fairly confident that they were written by the same program. This is the first four sentences from one of the comments, this one to my story the still and silent walls:

This description of the old house's memories is really vivid. It makes me think about the stories old buildings could tell. I've seen some old structures that seem to hold so much history. How do you think we could better preserve these memories locked within places like this house? And what kind of impact do you think it has on the people who grew up around such buildings?

I've highlighted the howlers. If the narrator of my story had been a person, this section of the comments would have been rational. But fortunately or at least unfortunately for Tweedle Dum (not the commenters real name), it was the walls in the house.

But it gets even dumber in the final three sentences (my comments are bracketed).

It's amazing how it (the walls) remembers all those different times. I wonder what it would be like to be that house, (do you really wonder this?) to have witnessed so much change. Do you think there are other places out there with equally rich, untold stories like this one? (Buildings witnessing history is a metaphor. Damn fella! Just damn!)

Some of you may take comfort in this as evidence that AI will never take the place of a creative. But sadly, I do not. As ridiculous as that paragraph is, it is evidence of a program trying to engage with the text at a human level.

Once it learns to do that fully I won't be able to tell the difference anymore. Will you?