In which I explore using Claude to build a new tool that can generate source material for avant garde poetic creations.
This is a relatively unique post for my site, but I’ll be keeping it brief. In working as a librarian, I have the challenge of exploring the ins and outs of Generative Artificial Intelligence in everyday life. This is not something that I can easily reconcile. There are many camps, and I can’t be in any of them, because I have a professional responsibility to understand and explore technology, especially technology that connects to information literacy.
While much of my GenAI world, for better and for worse, is connected to education and my job, I occasionally try to explore GenAI for non-librarian-y purposes as a way to triangulate thoughts and get a better grasp on what it can do and how it works. Again, for better and for worse.
My latest exploration was leaning into the acceptance of emerging technologies by many historical avant garde groups, throughout the 20th century. These groups, perhaps not all of the members of them but enough to canonize the idea, promoted the use of new technologies to respond to technology in general, and capture the world as they were immersed in it. Technologies became allegories for process and content as well. I think we’re in another moment where that is a layer to how artists can respond to what is controversial and what it is ethically suspect: by diving in and embracing with consciousness, GenAI can be both critiqued and embraced, in a strange duality that once again offers comment on the technology.
To cut to the chase, I spent a little while crafting a prompt with Claude, which is incredibly capable of creating lightweight browser-based apps, in order to generate a generative poetry tool. “The Poetry Machine” has a simple but representative name: it’s applying historic creative processes to generate new poetry as a machine can. With its human driving it, it is really only a tool, a stepping stone, for the output, which can then be utilized in performance.
Without adding any additional spoilers or comments, I invite you to check out The Poetry Machine. Note that this version is only available through Claude (it uses Claude’s proprietary engine and server), but it does have dynamic news headlines it can generate using internet-based LLM tech.
Because not everyone wants to be using Claude/GenAI all the time, or at all, I also created a similar HTML-only version that can be run anywhere. That can be accessed as a standalone file (just open it in a browser).
A final thought: with endless generative text based on endless news text (i.e. the world is constantly creating / pumping out more information), it begs the question of motivation, which is one of the biggest factors, I think, in humanity versus AI. Why generate the text? Why perform it? These questions, and many more, should be asked, and maybe partially answered, before any of these tools are used. For now, the motivation was to explore building the tool: this asks and answers other questions. Building the tool versus using it ends up being, in my mind, a venn diagram of motivation. And it seems like ultimately asking us to reflect on “why” is forever a good thing.