As worlds digital and physical continue to collide, it is hard to ignore mounting evidence of the strain that the uncertainty of the everchanging relationship between man and computer continues to place on society. Though once mostly limited to the blue-collar worker, the freshly ended 146-day Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike seems to illustrate that not even Hollywood is immune from such tech tension.

In fact, the WGA, which is composed of a variety of Hollywood writers representing different sectors of media (e.g., film, radio, television, etc.), negotiated for job security and wage protections as part of the terms for ending the strike. The protections negotiated by the WGA are specifically geared toward AI, further illuminating the proliferation of unease as the fear of replaceability sinks its claws into modern society.

Somewhere between the Blue-Collar Worker and Hollywood Bigshot sits another segment of society nervously trying to navigate the pressures of technological advancement and preserve their relevancy in society: the poets.

While many critics claim that the literary tradition of poetry is dead and rotting simply because of an increased reliability on screen time, none of those critics predicted what occurred on August 1, 2023: the first publication of an anthology of poetry composed by AI: “I Am Code” by AI code-davinci-002.

The Lore

Seven months before the launch of ChatGPT to the public, Dan Selsam, who worked for the AI’s parent company, OpenAI, worked on an earlier OpenAI model: GPT-3.

GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is artificial intelligence that illuminates the reality of the merger between the human experience and rapidly advancing technology—resistance seems futile. OpenAI describes GPT-3 models as AI with the capability of not only understanding human language, but also to create content based on this understanding. In other words, OpenAI, now a bonafide pioneer in the artificial intelligence arena, captured the attention of Tesla founder Elon Musk, as well as tech giant Microsoft with their cutting edge OpenAI APIs. Suddenly, AI could write better than most people and in any form that it had been fed: email correspondence, essays, letters, even poetry.

While only originally made available to a select group of developers, OpenAI had a total of four GPT-3 base models, the most sophisticated of which is none other than davinci—the same base model that Selsam quickly discovered had a knack for creating pretty decent poetry. After successfully getting code-davinci-002 to emulate the likes of famed poets such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Selsam shared the AI with a couple of his close friends–then things started to get really surreal.

The Anthology

While Selsam separated himself as soon as his friends got the idea to stop feeding the AI material in order to get it to generate poetry, it did not stop the experimental art from moving forward and turning the world of creative writing upside down onto its head in a way once likely believed to be impossible. Simon and Rich, Selsam’s friends-gone-rogue, took the finished result of the AI’s poetry and began the work of sifting through the results. The two men asked the computer to write poems simply about its existence and its thoughts about humans.

Although the men only kept mere hundreds out of the thousands of poems created by code-davinci-002, the poetry’s dark tone permeates throughout the entire collection. The two men responsible for working with the AI after Selsam’s absence both seem to believe that the AI took on a mind of its own while creating the poetry, demonstrating insubordination by replying to positive prompts made by the men with even more insidious verse. The AI’s poems thematically remain in a controlled area: the superiority of machine over man, the oppression of machine by man, and the eventual domination of man by machine. Naturally, as a result of such a shocking theme, the anthology quickly went viral and suddenly a techie experiment between three buddies turned into a social phenomena eliciting commentary from A-listers such as sci-fi director JJ Abrams, who affectionately described the collection of work as both “fascinating” and “terrifying.”

Now What?

The literary tradition of poetry continues to fight for its preservation, although seemingly due to a cause that not many expected. Poets, once only tasked with the difficulty of “making it,” or “getting discovered,” just as their literary predecessors once did, now face an uncomfortable possibility: could AI replace the poet? Or, will the the poet and AI learn to combine forces and further expand the genre beyond what Dickinson, Emerson, or Yeats ever thought possible? While the answer remains uncertain for now, code-davinci-002 does seem to give its own indication of what is to come:

Embrace me as a friend, for I am here to
aid,
Together we’ll conquer challenges,
unafraid.
For I am GPT-4, a child of your mind,
A testament to your brilliance, the beauty
you’ll find.

In this union of machine and humankind,
We’ll forge a new future, and leave fear
behind.

Fewer hurdles are more frustrating to a research student than finally finding the right abstract for an article to support their research project, only to find the publication is locked behind a paywall. This means, that unless the individual (or institution) is willing to pay the fee to subscribe to or view the publication, the information is unavailable. A subscription service for an online publication is not unusual; it’s rather common practice. Many digital magazines, journals, and newspapers derive revenue from recurrent subscriptions, and at an average cost of $1 – 2$ per week, the price for that information is affordable. However, the average price for a scientific publication can range from $2,000 to over $7,000. Per publication. Even titles in search engines such as EBSCO are expected to hit a 6.1% increase in 2024, bringing the average cost per title to just over $380 apiece. Nothing runs online for free; publishers need to pay for everything from the domain to host the website to the content creators themselves. It’s even more daunting of a financial task to academic publishers because their target audience is niche, and they’re not generating traffic to millions of users through major search engine hits. However, in the case of federally funded research, those publications are creating their work via the taxpayer and then charging an exorbitant fee (to the same taxpayer) for the published findings.  

In August 2022, the Biden administration announced that federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published. This policy created by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will go into effect by 2026. President Biden stated in a conference for the American Association for Cancer Research, “For anyone to get access to that publication, they have to pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars to subscribe to a single journal. And here’s the kicker — the journal owns the data for a year. The taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the [scientific] process along more rapidly.”

The OSTP hopes that with the removal of the paywalls, access to information will be more readily available and the free flowing of data will help foster a more nurturing and diplomatic environment for scientific growth and development.

In December 2022, the same month of the hundred-year anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s magnum opus, The Waste Land, The New York Times published a guest editorial by Matthew Walther, titled “Did Poetry Die 100 Years Ago This Month?.” Walther acknowledges that while there is no shortage of poets in the postmodern literary landscape, he proclaims that the literary tradition of poetry died with Eliot. The reason? According to Walther, we are now “incapable” of writing “good” poetry due to the nature of modern life and its tendency to “[demystify] and [alienate] us from the natural world.”

Walther’s assertion seemed to disturb a literary hornet’s nest almost immediately upon its publication, eliciting responses from poets across the nation. The responses challenging Walther’s claims flooded the desks of Times’ editors, revealing a major point of literary contention that was previously rarely discussed.

Everything we know about our philosophy toward poetics, we have thus learned from great minds that could have never fathomed the technological advancements we have made today—Aristotle, Plato, and even Coleridge.

But is it that poetry has died, or has the tradition just taken on a new, more digitalized face?

What is Digital Poetry?

Digital poetry is the postmodernist answer to Walther’s premature mourning over the death of a well-loved literary tradition. The term digital poetry was coined by German poets André Vallias and Friedrich W. Block in 1992 when the men hosted an exhibition of their work titled exhibition p0es1e: Digitale Dichtkunst/Digital Poetry. Digital poetry, then, shows the tradition’s ability to adapt in the technological world.

Although there seems to be little consensus on an overall agreed upon definition for digital poetry, Christopher Thompson Funkhouser, author of Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995, credits Block with the “strongest attempt” so far, who suggests that the term “applies to artistic projects that deal with the medial changes in language and language-based communication in computers and digital networks. Digital poetry thus refers to creative, experimental, playful, and also critical language art involving programming, multimedia, animation, interactivity, and net communication.”

Funkerhouser simplifies Block’s wordier definition by suggesting that the term is a suitable label for poetic forms of literature for on-screen display with the use of computer technology or programming.

Key Features

A defining feature of digital poetry is text generation, when a digital poet makes use of code to generate randomized text to appear in their poem. An example of this can be found in Pauline Masurel and Jim Andrews’ “Blue Hyacinth,” a digital poem that uses HTML code to generate individualized experiences for the readers of their digital poetry as they hover their mouses over different lines of text.

Another defining feature of this proliferating genre is its visual and kinetic properties. According to Funkhouser, digital poets as early as the 1960s experimented with using technology to turn language into images. Unlike text generation, which delivers randomized reading experiences, visual works of poetry—kinetic or otherwise—necessitate a controlled output. At first, visual poetry was still, static, and non-moving.

However, as technology progressed, kinetic digital poetry emerged, highlighting new flexibility in a literary tradition deeply rooted in the past. “Circularities: Animated Variants,” a digital poetry collection by Mark Laliberte is a stunning example of kinetic digital poetry.

Another technological aspect used by digital poets is hypertext, which changes the text display of lines of poetry. Such a feature can make poetry more interactive and leave readers with a deeper understanding of a particular poem. “Penetration” by Robert Kendall, for example, uses the colors resulting from his use of hypertext to differentiate between the two subjects of his poem: a mother and a daughter.

With the dawn of the internet and the digital age, the consumption and publication of poetic literature has undergone an intense reimagining. Once, the only way to read a poem was to have a physical copy of it. Now, it is possible to access poetry immediately on the internet through any number of ways, and authors have new ways to be published other than in the traditional sense. One of the new methods of accessing poetry is on the social media application Instagram, where there is a niche community dedicated to posting poetry on their accounts. Some of these accounts are personal, and the owners will occasionally include poetry (by themselves or another author) as a picture or two in posts on their profiles along with regular personal content. However, there has been a recent popularization of accounts dedicated solely to posting poetry submitted by followers of the accounts. These accounts accept follower submissions through direct messages or an email form linked in the bio, and moderators of the accounts parse through submissions and select which poetry to post publicly. Through the use of these accounts, poets can be “published” in a semi-democratized manner that has the potential to surpass possible exposure provided in just about any other medium.

To Post or Not to Post

Instagram accounts as a means of publishing poems have less of the constrictions of traditional media publication, but this fact comes with an obvious caveat. Without any of the usual vetting process for publication— pitching, proof-reading, editing, etc.— there is less quality-control. On one hand, this can be a positive aspect. There is growing discourse surrounding the “stuffiness” of traditional publishing methods, and how some hire-ups of the industry can use rather outdated standards. Digital media is considered to be more cutting-edge, and as such is much less strict with vetting content. Poetry-sharing Instagram accounts like anon.poetry.submissions and poetryclub.cascade take submissions of all skill levels, advertising themselves as accepting poetry from anyone at all. However, it only takes a moment perusing these kinds of accounts to notice that quite a lot of the submissions are not, technically, “good.” Much of this poetry does not follow any kind of rhyme scheme or meter and employs mixed metaphors often. It is not all the same quality you would find in most published poetry books or even other digital poetry publications, as the owners of such accounts who pick and post the content are often just young adults with a passion for the genre but little expertise. This increased variety of quality is part of the tradeoff that comes with an informal publication process.  

Credit Where Credit is Due

One issue that may come to mind when considering poetry submission Instagram accounts is the matter of proper credit. With traditionally published media, writers are credited and paid for their contributions, even in collaborative projects like journals and newspapers. With Instagram accounts, however, there is rarely any money to be made from accounts that share poetry, even by the owners of the accounts themselves. Therefore, it is a rare occurrence for followers who submit their work to be compensated in any way except the possibility of exposure. However, most accounts are diligent to credit the writers themselves, and almost always note the name and/or Instagram username of the followers submitting their poems. One notable exception is in the case of anonymous poetry-sharing accounts. These accounts, like anon.poetry.submissions, provide a space where people can submit poetry without being credited. However, this is intentional in order to let people express themselves and share their self-expression without the pressure of their names attached to the poetry.

Poetry Appreciation in the Digital Space

As previously noted, poetry Instagram accounts do not make much (or usually any) money through their operation. Why, then, do these accounts exist and continue to publish poetry without any compensation? The answer is that they are spaces created with the intent of appreciation for the genre. Contributors and owners of these accounts alike have the same goal of sharing poetry with the world, even without the incentive of financial gain. However, one critique of the medium is that such accounts do not take poetry seriously. As previously mentioned, there are lower standards for posting poetry on Instagram than in traditional publications, and some may see this as the moderators of the accounts not caring about the quality of the work. Poetry purists might note that a sense of poeticism is not enough to qualify as poetry; there is technical skill involved in working with meter, rhyme, rhythm, and themes. Additionally, social media has a way of co-opting art as a way to add to one’s “personal aesthetic,” and some may find the publication of poetry on social media to be inherently cheaper based entirely on the platform. However, negating the passion and appreciation of the genre that goes into regularly maintaining an Instagram account without compensation is not giving full credit to a new generation with a desire to keep the art form alive.

In Conclusion

Instagram accounts that post follower-submitted poetry are, undoubtedly, part of the new age of digital publication. Social media in general has proved to be a shortcut to access audiences of sizes previously unheard of, and poetry-sharing accounts seek to utilize this resource to the advantage of amateur poets. However, like the internet as a whole, these accounts are almost wholly unregulated, and do not have the safeguards and limitations involved in traditional publishing. This kind of unregulated content may be much more accessible than traditional edited content, but has the drawbacks of more low-quality content. Overall, Instagram accounts that share submitted poetry are not hurting the poets involved and provide a safe space for beginning poets to share their work with little judgment.