3 Intelligences You Already Use to Write Poetry (and how Ai can enhance them all)
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3 Intelligences You Already Use to Write Poetry (and how Ai can enhance them all)
Good poetry isn’t about expressing the self… poetry is about discovery.
Good poetry isn’t about expressing the self… poetry is about discovery.
Most of us have a very romantic view of the poet … sitting alone with a chapeau, smoking a pipe, creating genius lines of verse in isolation. This explains why we have such a hair trigger response when thinking about Ai as a tool for a poetry. If our meaning as poets is driven by the self, then Ai threatens our very existence.
But that’s not what poetry is about.
Writing poems is a networked activity for discovering new ways of seeing.
Technology has already been key to this activity, whether rhyming schemes or paper and pencil. Web technologies have made publishing poetry easy for everyone, focusing the act of writing around the community … not expressing oneself. Sure, you might discover your self in the process … but that is not the only thing to discover … and perhaps not the most important.
Poetry has always required multiple minds … even from the most genius individual. Ai is just another brain to enhance this network.
You already use at least 3 intelligences to write poetry … why not use another?
The sentient mind (or conscious self)
This intelligence is the one that makes choices, sees connections, and shapes poetry with intent. It is the ability to think and analyze words, not just react to them. It is the intelligence that makes connections and is the reason that we can learn and grow in a way that is meaningful to us. The ability to shape poetry with intent allows us to create our own linguistic realities.
We attribute the most agency to this intelligence … but it has much less agency than we think, especially with poetry.
Ai writing tools can help enhance these forms of intelligence by making our decisions easier, helping us see connections we may not have been aware of, and allowing us to have greater control over the process of creation. Most Ai writing tools will try to guess what word or image might come next in a poem. Most of these are useless, but 10% can provide interesting new directions or connections.
Using Ai is like adding 10% to your brain’s power. Artificial intelligence doesn’t take away from your agency as a poet … it empowers it.
The deep mind (or sub-conscious self)
We have little control over this intelligence and rarely even acknowledge its presence, but we can’t write poetry without it. Whereas the sentient mind is a tool to help us create, the deep mind is the tool to help us discover and the source of creativity and inner knowing. Poetry is a way of discovering the deeper truths that lie beneath the surface of the mundane and the hidden recesses of the human experience.
The poet is always looking for the hidden truth … the meaning that lies just beneath the surface.
Ai is more than just a computer program… it is a way of thinking. When we learn a new way of thinking we change our relationship with the sub-conscious. Everything about our experience changes our deep mind in unknown ways. The books we read, the movies we watch, and the people we meet all become input for our sub-conscious, which is constantly processing our experiences. Ai writing tools become a part of this dialogue by interacting with your writing and giving your deep mind more to process.
Sub-conscious elements of poetry grow when we interact with other minds. Artificial intelligence is just another node in this network.
The mystic mind (or the networked mind)
Depending on your ontological perspective, this can be many things … because it is that which we cannot explain. The muse, spirit, God, technology, brain chemistry … it is the sum of parts beyond ourselves, yet deeply connected. Human minds are connected in ways we can’t explain. Describing a large language model that has billions of parameters and input text is also impossible beyond the strictly scientific explanation.
Though not truly religious, we’ve built something that we can’t fully describe with language.
Interacting with Ai writing tools is like interacting with the unknown, because you can’t really comprehend all the language and parameters behind that large language module that is interacting with your writing. At the same time, these models are connected to human society by all the authentic text that makes up its “networked mind.” A poetic image in a poem written by some random person in another country or time might pop up in your Ai and change your poem in new ways.
There is something mystical, or mysterious, about how our minds connect on a higher level. Artificial intelligence is just a new channel for these connections.
Poetry is a collaboration of all 3 intelligences.
Neither is more important than the other. Bad poetry inevitably elevates one over the other. The poetry we write is not just a representation of our self, and no text ever remains static, changing as it is used by various minds, human or otherwise. Future iterations of artificial intelligence will be using the poetry we write today to understand the poetry of tomorrow. And the poetry of tomorrow will be informed by the artificial intelligence.
The more poets use Ai writing tools, the more we can influence the models and frameworks that become part of our linguistic and textual networks.
Artificial intelligence can’t replace any of these. Ai tools are like a prosthesis that can extend and enhance each of these modes of discovery. Mystics use many things to enhance discovery: dreams, visions, rituals, song, etc … all different ways to access other intelligences. Ai is just another one of these … a part of the poetic dialogue.
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