I asked the art AI what poetry looked like.
It sent me four pictures of birds.
They were perched upon books
With bits of nature growing through them:
Twigs, leaves, ferns, and pages.
This is mine, the bird seemed to say,
Leading me to long thoughts of melody, birdsong, rhythm…
In half the pictures the bird had torn
Up pages with its beak
In another it had made a nest of poems.
A place to raise a family
Betwixt the stanzas, between the rhymes,
Obscuring words and instilling meaning
The robot never intended,
But the human mind is trained to find.
When I asked the AI what story looked like
It rendered pictures of people.
Characters.
Which made me wonder.
Have we written so many poems about birds
That robots assume they belong there?
That, to this robot,
A bird is as indistinguishable from poetry
As character from stories.
As a poet and writer, I’ve often used visual prompts to kickstart ideas. I especially enjoy asking Midjourney to render images of abstract concepts. I’ve always been attracted to abstractions; they fire up my imagination in exciting ways. Being a writer, I tend to dig through these resulting images searching for the hidden story.
I think there’s a lot we can learn from having AI reflect us and our artistic works back to ourselves and I don’t think we’ve ever had the opportunity to study this before. This fascinates me in ways I’m still learning to understand.
This poem is based on my experience of asking Midjourney /imagine what does poetry look like? in V4. Why birds? I wondered and then I grabbed my notebook and started writing Poetry Birds.
Jennifer Shelby hunts for stories in the beetled undergrowth of fairy-infested forests. She fishes for them in the dark space between stars. As part her ongoing catch-and-release program, her fiction has appeared previously in Space & Time and her poetry in Augur magazine. You can learn more at jennifershelby.blog
Published in issue #144 • Special AI Discovery Issue • July 2023