It is easy to think of AI as either a miraculous tool, that will revolutionise our lives, or as an equally revolutionising disaster, that will rob us all of our jobs and maybe even souls. So it would be easy to review this journal either as transcendental brilliance, or an example of all that is wrong with poetry. The truth is rather more prosaic (if poetry can be said to be) for in these poems AI is neither a magic bullet nor a curse – it is a tool much the same as any other and it is the skill of the poet, not the quality of tool, that matters.
The AI Literary Review is a quarterly journal of “new poetry, exploring what happens when organic imagination meets algorithmic generation”, edited by poet Dan Power. It features a range of poets with very differing creative practices, but they are all bound together by an interest in how AI and poetry can work together. Issue One, published 1 July 2024, can be read for free online, and you can read our interview with Dan Power here.
I initially thought that reading the first issue of the journal would be interesting, and that I would see people playing with how to use AI as a tool in novel ways rather than finding any of the poems to really work as poems in their own right. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself reading poems that I enjoyed regardless of the AI aspect. Reviewing poetry can be slightly hard as it is often something almost ineffable that turns a competent poem into a good poem. I say “almost” as with care you can see that what sounds right, is the product of skill and hard work, rather than luck or the magic of inspiration. Issue One of the AI Literary Review shows that skill.
I suspect part of my enjoyment of Issue One was down to the range the poems displayed, no two were the same, and each interacted with AI in a different way. From the visual form of ‘All Secret Endings’ to the ekphrastic prose poetry of ‘Three Interrogations’, AI is used to create distinct results, showing how it is the choices made that dictate the result, not the tools used.
The collection of poems does, however, perhaps suffer from a lack of thematic coherence, as although these are all poems bound by their engagement with AI, that is like saying that a collection of poems drafted only with pen and ink should work thematically. It works as an interesting starting point but such thematic justification can only work so many times and so I hope that future issues are organised with an overriding logic and so have a greater sense of thematic unity.
‘How does it feel to feel sad in the evening?’ was particularly interesting in the way it played with language. At a first glance it looked like AI had been used to create meaningless nonsense words to flesh out ideas with newly invented words untethered to meaning. However, these are not the nonsense words of Lewis Carol that revel in the sonic feel of speech. They are bound by a logic that is oddly human, and so do not feel invented, rather unearthed from latent linguistic potential. As such the poems do retain that human feel, for these poems showcase the same creative instincts as any other, they just have been rendered into words with an additional tool.
It must be noted that almost all of the poems mention that whilst they were made with AI, they were “composed”, “edited”, “arranged”, “collaged”, “pieced together” or were “crafted in response” and had “some original phrases added” to the AI’s output. Poetry still requires a poet. AI, by its very nature, is not capable of creation for it requires someone to instruct it to create, and that initial part of creation is the fundamental aspect of the process.
These poems are the proof that AI is not necessarily a harm to creative practices, and in particular poetry, instead it is a tool that in the right hands – that is the hands of poets – can be used to build upon and develop poetry for the better. It is only in the wrong hands that wish to use it to replace the work of poets, that it becomes an issue. This journal gives me hope – hope that AI will be used by and for poetry, not against it.
Word by Ed Bedford
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