What Is a Poem Anyway: Poets vs. AI

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The advent of artificial intelligence has made the line between creative production and collage all the more blurry. If we say that AI is only stringing together words whose sound and meanings are pleasing to us, how is that different from the poet’s work if a poet’s work is merely, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “the best words in the best order”? In this course we will conduct experiments in poetry both in the presence and in the absence of generative AI. We will work to identify what, on our own terms, distinguishes our own creative output from the work of a machine. In the process, we may reach a new understanding of the role of the imagination in the production of language, meaning and song.