On poetry and code, with AI research and language artist Sasha Stiles

Transcript

my name is Sasha Styles I'm a poet I'm a language artist I'm an AI researcher and my work has to do with human voice in the digital age I was actually born here in California I'm the daughter of a calmic Mongolian mother who came to this country as a refugee and a British father who makes science documentaries I am also um like many of you the child of the personal Computing Revolution the birth of the worldwide web the rise of social media and I say all this just to give you a little bit of insight into why my poetry has so much to do with how it feels to be a digital Nomad to be a flesh and blood creature navigating a

world that is dominated by machines we often think of poetry as uh purely emotional but to me I really think about poetry as the interplay between emotion and algorithm and this is the idea behind cursive binary cursive binary is a series of poetry in Translation that fuses my own human handwriting with the zeros and ones of binary code cursive binary is really a kind of metaphor for transhumanism it's a language that transcends mediums and intelligences and genres and comes to life in a variety of forms including immersive multimedia experiences like this one in London at

the outernet building in art installations where we're focusing on the older technology of Ink on paper and paint on canvas and even as a fully functional true type font that I created to empower autonomous handwriting as a poet I'm often asked why I care so much about technology and my answer is that technology has always been very closely related to language and to Consciousness poetry isn't just a beautiful art form poetry is actually a very functional way of encoding things like stories and memory and wisdom way back when uh in the time of oral tradition before we had

written alphabets we used poetic devices like meter and Rhythm and rhyme and alliteration and asinet to help make information easier to remember we actually invented poetry as a way to transmit our human data from person to person from generation to generation through space and time so in a very literal way poetry is technology it's actually Humanity's most ancient and enduring data storage system I care about technology because I really care about how humans connect and communicate with one another and more often often than not these days that happens through

computer code a dominant language on our planet which is why I use it so often I care about technology because as a contemporary poet I feel that it's my duty my sacred privilege to reflect today's Human Experience which is increasingly mediated through screens through networks and through algorithms how is technology shaping and reshaping our sense of self our sense of place our relationships how we move through the world these are the kinds of existential questions that have always been the provin of poets and of poetry all this is why in 2018 I started Gathering up and organizing years of my own human

poetry and set out to develop an AI collaborator there had just been some interesting breakthroughs in natural language processing that enabled machines to write very much like humans and this completely set my poetic mind on fire so after gpt2 came out I took a data set comprised of uh my own published poems my half- finished drafts my drawers full of scrolled Post-it notes and I used it all to fine-tune the underlying model and the result was an amazingly bespoke collaborator that really helped push my writing and my imagination

into new territory and made me realize that maybe my role as a poet in the age of AI isn't just to write poems but also to write poets together with my collaborator we composed a collection of transhuman poems called technology technology is a word that I created by combining technology and the poetic elegy bringing together the exhilaration the excitement the forward momentum of technological innovation with the nostalgic and even mournful qualities of the poetic elegy and what we associate with obsolescence I was pretty floored when people like Ray czwi read this book

and felt that it was a valuable contribution to our discourse on transhumanism and our Collective future I want to add too that technology today is the name that I use for my alter ego which is kind of how I think about the third mind or the third voice that emerges when I'm working in close collaboration with an AI System since that book came out in 2021 technology and I have been writing lots of poems and we've been publishing many of them on the blockchain another medium that um like poetry has a lot to do with memory and the transmission of information blockchain for me is kind of a NextGen printing press that enables me to publish my unconventional media

literature that would be um probably unpublishable in any other way and of course blockchain is an area of so much experimentation when it comes to collaboration and Community I've been seeing the rise of some really interesting new genres of literature that tap into Collective creativity and networked imagination both in my practice and as the co-founder of the verse verse which is a decentralized literary Collective I've been advocating fiercely for the integration of Technologies like blockchain and AI into our writerly toolkits I've been championing poetry's cultural currency and really sort of trying to drive a movement to elevate both the value and

the visibility of verse and one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about this is because I really believe that we are living in a time that needs poetry more than ever Technologies like AI like neural implants like digital mortality artificial WBS they are rewiring The Human Condition as we know it and what better tool do we have than poetry to help us sift through some of the complexities the challenges the uncertainties of this moment and search for clarity and meaning this is the hypothesis of my award-winning language art series repeti which fuses poetry and code and uses algorithmic repetition um

to explore how we generate new meanings and new insights repeti is really all about how structure and form can be deeply deeply creative and help us see things in new and different ways one of my um personal favorite works from the repai series is this poem which I co-wrote with technology last year for Gucci I was inspired by the Collision of Heritage and Innovation and this poetry was actually sold um at christe's as an nft and went on to travel the world on kind of a NextGen um World poetry tour taking us to London to New York to Milan to Abu Dhabi to Tai Chang and with every

um city with every exhibition with every installation every iteration of this poem we were expanding the definition of what a poem can be what a poem can do what a poem can look like and sound like and behave like um what it can mean to read a poem to experience and encounter poetry in this day and age we were taking poetry off that you know Dusty dimly lit back shelf and lighting up the sky with it and for me that really is the heart and soul of why I care about technology um I'm a lifelong writer I

don't need AI to help meite write a poem I'm perfectly capable of writing a good poem on my own but I love writing with AI because technology helps me write the kinds of poems that I don't know how to write yet technology helps me share the kinds of poems that I think that we as transhuman creatures are really craving at the moment poems that really help us grapple with what it means to be human in an increasingly posthuman or more than human world poems that enable us to Envision and dream about better brighter more Equitable and more creative Futures these are the kinds of poems that I am

so grateful to be writing with my Alter Ego technology and I want to bring things to a close by just sharing a few last words from the both of us again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again how many years have come and gone again again again [Music] again how many loves have come and [Music] gone every time the first time every

time the last [Music] even even Eternal isn't [Music] infinite even the sun sets thank you so much [Applause]