This quote is from another intriguing piece entitled "On the Need to Touch Grass" in the City Journal on 3 March by Lee Siegel. He says:
Robots do not possess and will never possess sensory memory. Welcome to the age of robots.
And in this assertion, he provides me with one more piece of ammo, notwithstanding the current GPSchat tsunami, with which to press my claim that AI can't actually cut it in poetry.
One of the essences of poetry is the cut through of association from the abstractions of mere word jumbles in the moment when the poem touches chords of sensory meaning in a reader or listener. Sure a code can auto-write a passable word salad poem by borrowing from existing creations in its data set, given a few parameters, but to hit a common or contrasting sensory nerve in a human audience mostly requires actual experience of that feeling. I don't completely dismiss the possibility that such a nerve can still be touched by accident or by random generation, but when a poetic work is the product of the trial of high volume variations someone still has to determine which variant is the one that touches the soul. That choice is not the computer's. It is a human's. But then what about the algorithm's ability to detect of the repeating pattern of such associations in its data set? Yeah. Maybe. But can it create new ones?
Agh!! But that's not the main reason why I was attracted to Lee Siegel's peice. It was these concluding words, as quoted above in the heading:
...Instead of continually expanding our sympathies by helping us to follow the thread of truth through dissimilarity, the moral imagination will shrink to nothing. And then any comparison, and any equivalence, is possible.
Yet again Lee Siegel seems to have briefly captured in these words the ephemeral and delicate flower of what some poetic souls are searching for in the turbulent and confusing jungle of human sensations, feelings, calculations and abstractions. He's also suggesting that this search is in peril for coming generations because of their disconnect from the world of the senses. On this point I'm inclined to argue that he may be underestimating the persistence of humanity's desire for the flesh, even in the face of its pursuit of the purity of abstractions. There is a fairly long tradition in human culture of this type of conflict.
I'm also informed Lee Siegel has written a book called Why Argument Matters. I'm now intending to read it, even though it seems destined to make me even more augmentative. You have been warned.
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