Blog #2

Something that has been on my mind since class last week is our discussion of artificial intelligence creating fiction works that cannot be distinguished between digital and human creations. This question arose after I was introduced to a website, in which visitors were challenged to distinguish between two poems: Which poem was written by a human, and which was written by AI?

During this discussion, I posited that the one way to distinguish between these two forms of writing would be to attempt to analyze it. As a student of literature, I have spent hours decoding and deconstruction prose and poetry alike. I know as well as anyone else in our class that it is possible to discuss and analyze certain pieces of literature ad nauseam. This, I assert, is the crux of humanity that we see embedded in human writing. Despite the fact that a coherent, even compelling, piece of writing can be generated by a computer, I believe that it will always lack this inherent human quality, which can be proved and deduced through analyzation. .

Literature written by humans is often a reflection, or allegorical manifestation of the author. Or at least, the writing harbors something that the author viewed as significant. Literature written by humans is wrought in themes that are universally grappled with by other humans. Computers lack the lived experiences and emotional sentiency that are often the catalytic forces in authors. Humans draw on lived moments and forces of emotion to inform their writing- fictional and nonfictional, poetry or prose. Computers can draw only on the already written works to inform their writing. If you believe what Plato asserted in The Phaedrus, the argument which Ong defended in the most recent reading, then you can see the problem with already written works being the computer’s only source of information.

What would then follow, is that computers cannot write insightfully or truthfully about grief, displacement, prejudice, the human condition of loneliness, et cetera, as humans can. They may be able to do so, seemingly, on a surface level, however, what I assert is that they do not hold a deeper meaning.

Let me know is you agree with this point of view or not!! In the meantime, here is the website I was talking about in that class/in the beginning of the post. http://botpoet.com/