Dear Reader,
In the late forties, I remember being introduced to Walt Disney's
1940 feature-length film, Fantasia, when it was making the rounds
at local theatres during one of its regular revivals. Its blend
of animation and classical music made it a nostalgically ideal
choice for a Saturday afternoon outing for kids. (This was before
you could buy the VHS cassette and see it whenever you felt
like it, which I did as an adult.)
In the late fifties, I brought my little sister to a showing
and couldn't understand why some segments puzzled and even disturbed
her. She had tapped into the nightmarish "Rite of Spring"
by Stravinsky and Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain"
in ways that escaped me because I was still too enraptured by
Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker." We both thought Dukas's
"Sorcerer's Apprentice" was too silly to discuss.
Mickey Mouse was cast as an overworked wizard's assistant using
a chant to multiply brooms to do his job of fetching water from
the fountain, then nearly drowning when things got out of control.
The lesson seemed so obvious and not worth our time.
These is a blended version of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"
from Wikipedia : In 1897, Paul Dukas based his symphonic poem
based on the14-stanza 1797 poem by Goethe, which begins as an
old sorcerer departs his workshop, leaving his apprentice with
chores to perform. Tired of fetching water by pail and filling
the basin, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for
him, using magic in which he is not fully trained. The floor
is soon awash with water, and the apprentice realizes that he
cannot stop the broom because he does not know the magic required
to do so.
The apprentice smashes the broom with an axe, but each piece
becomes a whole broom that takes up a pail and continues fetching
water. At this pace, the entire room quickly begins to flood.
When all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns and quickly breaks
the spell. The poem concludes with the old sorcerer's statement
that only a master should invoke powerful spirits.
This morning's headline is about the possibility of AI becoming
capable of destroying humanity, but the analogy of Mickey and
his self-induced plight came to mind last week during a meeting
of poets. The discussion centered on whether to offer discussion
sessions centered on AI and the writing of poetry.
If you have ever been inspired to write poetry, it might occur
to you that artificial intelligence could never feel what you
felt, as you struggled to set that uniquely wrought amalgam
of words onto the page, returning to poke at it repeatedly to
see if it has any life in it. Or feel the elation when the word
or line break that needed revision pops out at you. How could
anything artificial step into that process? Would AI be able
to create a poem with a pedigree of joy and discomfort that
comes with writing a poem? And would a reader be able to tell
the difference?
Lots of questions and opinions emerged that evening, I mostly
stayed quiet, except to say that AI is present and there should
be discussions offered (actually I said something about sticking
heads in the sand). Are there uses and cautions that we, as
poets, can LEARN about? Is this like some enhanced spell check,
an improvement that I need and appreciate? But I think that
it has gone beyond simple, and I want to know more about it.
I would like to decide (or not) to join in a discussion and
learn from a multi-aged, multi-disciplined set of "experts"
who use it and can say what it is about. Is this another millennial
scare? Most of all, what, in my small subset of the poetry world,
might it mean to us as a community of writers?
A few years ago, a friend sent me a poem "typed in the
style of Judith Ferrara" saying "Look what I did with
AI!" I was horrified when I read it, both because it read
like a poem I could have written until the last line - transitions
and endings have always been my twin nemeses. I would never
have written it! I felt insulted and deleted the poem, then
responded and told her how I felt. She understood completely
because she is my friend. But what if she submitted it to a
journal and it was accepted?
