Language models can only write poetry

 

language models is a device for generating ideas and producing unusual juxtapositions that might not otherwise occur to you when you’re writing. In a sense, we all do this every day when we compose text on our phones with the help of technologies like quicktype and autocomplete.

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language models can only produce poetry. I never said that a language model can produce a poem. Hartman distinguishes between the two in Virtual Muse, saying:

… the program could produce a simplistic kind of poetry forever, but it could never, by itself, produce a poem. All sense of completeness, progress, or implication was strictly a reader’s ingenious doing.

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I like the distinction that Hartman draws here. To tease it out a little bit, Hartman seems to be saying that poetry is a material, which can result from any process (whether conventional composition, free-writing, or tinkering with language models). A poem, on the other hand, is an intentional arrangement resulting from some action: someone decides where the poem begins and ends. A poem, I would say, is the site where “hollow and void” poetry is tactically deployed in a physical and social context, in order to achieve a particular effect. The poem unites poetry with an intention. So yes, a language model can indeed (and can only) write poetry, but only a person can write a poem.

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- language models is only helping us generating ideas, and materials, they are not writing the poem, just poetry.