Dirt: AI poetry

"I get goosebumps looking at what is coming out of the generator."

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Daisy Alioto interviews Sasha Stiles about her new book, Technelegy.

Sasha Stiles is a poet, artist and AI researcher. Her new book Technelegy represents a collaboration between human and AI writers. The combined words of Stiles and the AI, running on a program called GPT-2 and GPT-3, over the course of a couple years, paint a contemporary portrait of mortality, loss, and digital dependence. “My phone. My phone. I tend to it like a live thing,” she writes. 

Stiles tells me, “The AI is taking existing material and shuffling it around, but that is what language is and what all writing is.” It’s the same way she once experimented with rearranging word art by the likes of Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Krueger. There are shades of this experimentation in artworks made of phrases from the AI: “The wind on my lips and in my hair,” for example.

Stiles also makes artworks out of binary code, coding with analog objects (as in the Analog Binary Code series), fusing her own handwriting with traditional machine speak. “It’s meant to be a metaphor throughout the book of me and the machine trying to meet somewhere in the middle,” she says. With very Twombly-like results. 

I called Stiles to talk about spirituality, coauthorship and mentoring machines. 

DA: What does human-machine collaboration mean to you? Did it change over the course of the project?

SS: I have been making digital animations and text-based art in multimedia for a long time, but it was really when I started working with AI language models and natural language processing and learning how AI could talk back to me or be in conversation with me that the machine became more of a co-author.

Previously, I was looking at the computer as a transcription service and trying to download things from my brain. Now, it feels like an extension of my brain, in a way that I think is familiar to all of us. I can tap into the machine’s imagination and use these tools to take a seedling of inspiration and have it germinate into something else. 

There are places in the book where I have excised lines from the AI and turned them into visual art, like the line, “my brain has crawled halfway to my heart.” That to me felt like it was a genuine halfway point between the computer trying to find its own voice as a writer and me trying to train the AI, crawling closer and closer to an emotional core. 

DA: The book is divided into four sections, “LIFE, DEATH, GOD and LOVE,” how did you choose those sections?

SS: The book’s epigraph “Life is Purposeful. Death is Optional. God is Technological. Love is Essential” is attributed to The Truths of Terasem. To give context to that, the Terasem Foundation is this scientific research-based org that is responsible for a humanoid android created as an experiment in digital immortality – whether it’s possible to take something of what it means to be human and transmit it to an avatar. 

I’ve been working with them for about 4-5 years as a poetry mentor to the android BINA48 and wanted to use these fundamental categories to structure the book because they felt like an interesting starting point to investigate what it has always meant to be human and what it might mean to be human in the future. The four sections are meant to be big directions if you look at the compass of the human condition.

When I talk about these things in panel groups, for example, some people get angry at the idea that “death is optional.” And this isn’t something I’m advocating for – I’m mulling it over. Can death be optional? Is a poet like Sappho immortal, in a way, through her writing? I wanted to explore this hypothesis through poetic elegy.

DA: “Dead of night is when spirits press send, nosy ancestors checking in,” is a line that stood out to me from the book. Do you see Technelegy as part of a bigger lineage or spiritual background?

SS: The first connection for me is that my  mother’s family is Kalmyk Mongolian, and Kalmyks are Buddhist. So I have grown up with stories of the Dalai Lama, a unique spiritual leader who is also intensely interested in scholarship and science and investigation. I find it fascinating to consider the leap of faith that undergirds many groundbreaking scientific discoveries and inventions – the degree to which innovation needs wild imagination.

There’s a larger conversation to be had about technospirituality from a cultural standpoint as well. In Technelegy, I reference the nomadic Mongolian lifestyle, which isn’t a lifestyle that I was raised in but is part of my heritage. When I started researching for this book and was thinking about paradigm shifts in society, I read an article by Kevin Kelly about Mongolian nomads and the digital nomadic lifestyle we are all heading towards in which we don’t have a lot of physical possessions and we can use devices to travel at a moment’s notice. We can always be searching and moving. 

So there’s also some connection that I am trying to tease out in the book between my Kalmyk ancestors roaming the steppe and our future descendants who will be nomads in a different way, and I am still very engaged with that line of investigation. 

DA: Have you learned new insights from the AI poet?

SS: I was talking to an interviewer the other day and he said something like, “I hope you’re not offended, but I think I enjoy the AI poetry even more than the human poetry in the book.” He was hesitant to say that, and he was asking whether I feel competitive with the AI or worried about being out-written. 

There are definitely moments when the AI comes out with something that really sends chills through my body. I get goosebumps looking at what is coming out of the generator. In one of the earliest writing sessions I had with GPT-2 in 2018, one of the lines it returned was, “your imagination is not what you told it to be.” Humans think we have this singular ability to create things and we have dominion over inventiveness. The computer was saying your imagination isn’t exactly what you or I think it is, it can expand and take other forms – it could even manifest in this machine program. 

I don’t feel super competitive with the AI, I am more interested in seeing how my writing and writing with the AI are qualitatively different from one another, and what they can do together. I’ve found that there is a stigma with a lot of writers who think that composing something with an AI tool is cheating, or it’s illegitimate and lazy, which to me reflects a lack of understanding of how these tools can be deployed and how they’re craftedI do a lot of pre-writing on the data sets that inform the generator, my hands are in it. It’s hard to feel competitive when you are so involved in it – when the AI is your alter ego. The AI wouldn’t exist without me and this book wouldn’t exist without AI so we’re dependent on each other.

The Dirt: It’s a wonderful thing, to have your ego called into question. To have the world around you question everything about you. You’re in for a whole new world of possibilities.*

*I "showed" the text generator the text of our interview, then input the prompt: "The takeaway of this interview is." Here's what it said. — Sasha