Basic 10: experiments in artificial intelligence, memory, and coming of age
A story in three parts
Part 2
Image caption: Image generated by Bing Image Generator powered by Designer. Author’s prompt description: ‘pixel image, 19-year-old university student, woman, clubbing, listening to music, working in a pub, studying.’
Belying the existential panic around ChatGPT and other AI chatbots is a deeply humanistic fear that we will, somehow, be stripped of our humanity, understood in terms of creativity. Poetry for me is a quintessentially creative act, one I reach for in search of beauty, comfort, and wisdom.
I spend the year before my fall exchanging poetry snippets on iMessage with a friend. Poems about time, poetry about the seasons, and about leaves.
“January is the month for dreaming”, garden writer Jean Hersey writes in 1964. “February / is the loneliest / month of the year”, incants Kashmiri poet Sanna Wani in 2022. “In March / I’ll be rested, / caught up and human”, writes Sylvia Plath in 1953 in a letter to her mother Aurelia. “It’s April / no May / it’s May / such little things have to be / established in morning / after the big things of night”, according to Frank O’Hara in 1961. “It is June. I am tired of being brave”, Anne Sexton writes in 1981. “The movie in my mind is blue-- / A June runs into warm July / I think of little else but you”, goes the stanza from Wendy Cope’s sensuous From June to December: Summer Villanelle. “When I grow up, I want to be September, August used to say”, read the opening lines of Kiki Dimoula’s poem The rain of return. From Louise Gluck’s poem October: “The light has changed; / middle C is tuned darker now. / And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.” “It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year”, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter to her sister Lavinia in 1864. “It is December and we must be brave”, says Natalie Diaz in her 2021 poem Manhattan is Lenape Word as if responding to Anne Sexton’s lament earlier in time.
For my birthday, after the accident, my friend collects these snippets of poetry into a spiralbound desktop calendar without a designated year so I can flip through it each month without end.
As I continue to mess around with ChatGPT, I ask it to compose a poem about ‘breaking’ to see what it might come back with. It returns this dribble in iambic pentameter:
I choose ‘breaking’ deliberately for its ambiguity. When I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem about ‘breaking’, I anticipated that it would respond with the metaphorical and commonly held interpretation of ‘breaking’, especially when that is coupled with the request for ‘poetry’: ‘romantic heartbreak’. Without further context, it is not a bad guess that I might have been on the hunt for cadences to soothe my soul. Indeed, in digging up my old university assignments, I found a biography of heartbreak that I had long forgotten, having happily moved on years ago.
Nested within an old assignment on Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) was a heartbroken 19-year-old. We had been asked to write a webpage about ourselves using HTML, well before profilicity had become the widespread thing many of us now practice in our private and professional lives. Amongst the descriptions of origin, belonging, relating, and dwelling (‘I live in a two storey house… we don’t have central heating so our house gets quite cold’) is nestled a declaration of love: ‘And then there's X -- my boyfriend of six months -- who I love from here to the moon and back, and if this ever goes on the WWW then the whole world will know.’
I write the above in fleshy knowledge at the time that an only just embarked on ‘big love’ is already over and I engage in that magical thinking I learn about later first from Joan Didion and then from Annie Ernaux, that sits alongside loss: if I write him into my software, I might hardwire him into my life. Maybe then my gut feeling will be wrong, and this will be a relationship that sticks. I was trying to do things with words, but my gut wasn’t wrong, and the relationship didn’t stick.
You: What is a gut feeling?
ChatGPT: A gut feeling is an intuitive sense or instinctive reaction to a situation, often without conscious reasoning. It’s a subjective sensation that people describe as a hunch or a “feeling in the gut” that guides their decision-making.
You: Do you have gut feelings about things?
ChatGPT: No, I don’t have feelings or instincts like humans do. My responses are generated based on patterns and information present in the data on which I was trained. If you have a question or need information, feel free to ask!
**
‘Breaking’ is a word with which, since May of last year, May, not April, I have developed a different relationship, the metaphorical and the general collapsing into the literal and the particular.
On May 18th I broke my ankle badly while walking the dog with major surgery ensuing a few weeks later. I am now developing a permanent relationship with a metal rod and seven screws that have been used to stabilise my fibula bone around the ankle.
Magical thinking is sprinkled all over the diary I kept for the duration of my convalescence – my own personal pandemic, nine weeks on my back in bed, my left leg in a cast. Outside the English summer in June (always a surprise, always short-lived) raged, inside I raged too: “I just want to turn back the clock to last Thursday morning and not have taken the dog for a walk…”.
The loss that accompanies personal injury is not so different to that of a heartbreak: plans cancelled, mental acrobatics to be performed, forward trajectories halted, pain, and terror. As I emerged out of the general anaesthetic, I felt myself dissolved. I am shattered and I bawl uncontrollably as the words of another patient onlooker float across the ward: “why is she crying so much?” No amount of morphine seems to calm me. Did I feel the drilling in my bone?
“You have every reason to be in such pain”, the real and brilliant poet Lavinia Greenlaw tells me, as she recounts her own, or an unnamed narrator’s struggles with illness in her poem The Break. She/her narrator are patiently waiting for that pain ‘to knit itself to me – to become something I carried without feeling, something incorporated to the extent that it is not known’.
It is the voice of my loved one, mediated through a cordless telephone the duty nurse hands to me, that settles me post-surgery, and in the long days that follow I find solace in the rhythms of film, the pulse of the essay form, the cadences of poetry, and the text messages of friends.
**
Back on my feet in the autumn term, I cover a class on visual sociology for a colleague. It is only at this point, six months since my accident that I can say, with some confidence that I am starting to feel better.
I cover the session on visual interpretation. We go through a few approaches with the students: semiotic approaches (the meaning of an image resides within its frame), contextual approaches (the meaning of an image is derived from beyond its frame), performative approaches (images do things to the world). We end the session with a warning about ‘the problem of polysemy’. Preferred readings become preferred meanings, Stuart Hall tells us, his media reception theory from the 1990s. Yesterday’s preferred meanings and readings are coded in today’s algorithms.
Breaking = romantic heartbreak.
When I ask Bing to generate an ‘8-bit art, 46-year-old writer with a broken ankle’, three of the four images are of men. Preferred readings become preferred meanings. At least, I think to myself, the single woman is black and wonder whether Toni Morrison might be pleased about this, subjected as she was to incessant questioning about her cast of characters. This is a problem for which we develop other readings: we negotiate, and we oppose preferred readings. We generate new meanings.
“I wanted a break”, I quip to a friend, “but this is not what I had in mind”. Happenstance is, by definition, not something you plan for, it cannot be coded.
I find myself stumbling on English idioms and phrases that used to roll off my tongue quite unreflexively: “break a leg!”, “let’s take a break”, “did you have a good break?”, “give me a break!”, “you need a break!”. They make me wince and I search for alternative modes of expression.
At the close of the year, as the institutional edifice I work in continues to crumble around me, I am asked by the coach I have been working with to review my year as a three-act play. I have been working with her for a few months now, she is helping me think about who I want to be when I grow up: not a question associated with adulthood, but coming of age, I have learnt, is not a one-time affair. Reviewing my year as a play is a new to me way to perform that familiar end of year ritual of reminiscing and stocktaking. Who were the cast of characters? Cast: another word I now relate to differently, never having expected an actual cast to be a key protagonist of my year.
How can we ever know if an interpretation is the ‘right’ one? Also a problem of polysemy. We can’t. As writers and readers, as interlocutors to each other in life, we risk. Life, like art, is more polysemous than it is precise. It is a trait of being human that we navigate the ambiguity and polysemy of language. We make things of it and from it.
When I teach my first-year students about ‘the self’, itself a Western idea of personhood born out of the Enlightenment and fortified by industrialisation and the birth of psychoanalysis, I also teach them about play.
Our selves emerge out of social interaction and symbolic, and sometimes shambolic, communication with others. A ‘conversation of gestures’ is how pragmatist George Herbert Mead coined it in the early 1900s and his points still stands.
We become ‘self’ conscious through the conversations of gestures we stage with one another and our carers as we grow, these gestures later turning into language. We take on the role of the other through play, we engage with different perspectives through dialogue within ourselves (our ‘I’s and our ‘me’s) and between each other.
Our actions only become so after the fact, our ‘I‘s being the source of spontaneity and creativity, our guts giving us a good sense, if we care to listen, of whether to risk or retreat.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy likes to illustrate the point with a baseball analogy – a throw or a catch is never the same twice.
I prefer to use the example of flirting, believing – hoping -- this to be closer to my students’ experiences, as it was for me at that age, but also because it goes to the heart of polysemy: everything is said in flirting, nothing is said in flirting; everything is possible, nothing might happen. Play is inherently ambiguous.