Artificial Intelligence, the poetic process, and the critical editor
Victoria Punch · 2024
This chapter offers a creative investigation of AI poetic processes through a chimerical experiment blending poetry and prose, with words and ideas generated by humans and AI. It sets out the author’s own practice as a poet and asks AI to be self-reflective of its own literary processes. The chapter takes as its starting point a set of numbered ‘prompts’, presented in the form of a poem, questioning how and why a (or rather, this) poet writes poetry. The answers to these questions are further reconfigured as a poem about the poetic process, which are then critiqued and edited by both poet and ChatGPT. Finally, it analyses what emerges from these creative pieces, to see what this process might reveal both about human and AI approaches to poetry. Drawing upon selected recent scholarship on machine creativity and AI-human literary collaboration, it offers new insights from a practitioner perspective into what AI can and can’t do with poetry.