I have two main skills. I can write. I can program. I was interested in language poetry. Language poetry stresses different ways of generating language from language, emphasizes language as both subject and object, and de-emphasizes meaning. There were times when language poetry appeared to be struggling against meaning, but others when it felt saturated in meaning. Like the words alone weren't enough to hold the amount of meaning in the poem. I was interested fundamentally in the latter. My instinct toward producing this effect was always compression. I also like to torture metaphors until they've provided all of their meaning. Those are just funny little things I do. Style stuff. Instincts. Probably the product of some combination of neuroses and mental illness. Definitely the sort of thing I want to cling to and identify myself with.
So, language generating language. I wrote the first text generator as a template generator that could also operate on tags, call mini-dictionaries, and other stuff. The second generator included ngram generation which I added later. Natural language and ngram generation are both considered a part of AI. Further efforts improved both template and ngram generation but it was never more than either/or. Attempts to hybridize the two met with really random results. I've been doing this for over a decade, so imagine my surprise when it became bad.
At this point, I'm pretty old. Any positive headway my personality was going to make either I already made or deemed it not worth making. I don't have patience for bullshit, wankers, or wanker bullshit. I just don't. I've built ngram algorithms from the ground up, wrote my own coding language, and certainly know how to write. So, I don't need to justify myself to anyone who thinks their poetry can be replaced by text generation. I don't.
Now, here's the secret sauce. What I do can never be replaced. Not by AI, not by my clone, not if I ran an acolyte-producing bootcamp. I can't be replaced. While any single poem can accidentally be reproduced by another poet given a similar set of circumstances, the totality of my work, the effort I made, the way I evolved my craft all grew out of an environment that I participated in. An AI fed the same data wouldn't have the same human needs as me. It can only mimic me. Which is fun. Anyone can mimic you. Why is it suddenly terrifying because it's a machine?
So, that the point is driven home, if I was reborn again, perhaps 40 years ago, whatever I produced would be very different. I can't even replace myself. So, the idea of worrying about these things reeks of a kind of insecurity and small-mindedness I associate with very young people who have overestimated the novelty of their contributions.
I don't know what to tell you, guys. I've literally never had this problem. I consider being able to recognize great poetry a poetic act. Being able to see why it works when it works requires a poetic act. Making poems is just a part of that. To me, it's all part of one big thing that's a life experience. So, the idea that it can be taken from me is not within the realm of possibility. To me, it's a gift I share with people. You can feed my language into a generator, but you can't feed me into a generator. Even if you could, I'd be okay with that. Sounds awesome. Sign me up.
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