Book Announcement: I Create Like the Word: Poetry in the Age of Machine Intelligence

A new title in Black Ocean’s Undercurrents series.

After months of ferocious prep—and years of ideation—I’m thrilled to finally announce I Create Like the Word: Poetry in the Age of Machine Intelligence, which will publish in 2024 as a new title in Black Ocean’s Undercurrents series.

It’s a joint effort with artist-roboticist Alexander Reben, and will feature essays, roundtable discussions, interviews, an ekphrastic creative exercise, and other curated odds & ends.

As the subhead indicates, this book dives deep on the intersection of poetry and machine intelligence, with a particular eye to recent developments in large language models, which have generated considerable interest and concern through OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Our hope is that if you’re curious about the past, present, or future of poetry and artificial intelligence (AI) this book will be a helpful starting point—both the new domains of possibility and necessary critical positions.

I Create Like the Word has been years in the making. It began in 2018-19 in conversations with

Daniel Lisi

(I encourage you to sign up for his publishing business Substack, Publisher's Stack) about the prospect of spawned poetry (poetry produced by AI in the style of a given poet)—and has since evolved into the more robust beast it is shaping up to become. That’s about all I can say at the moment, but we’ll be be making more announcements in the months to come.

If you’re interested in staying up-to-date, sign up for the email list here: https://www.blackocean.org/createword.

More from the publisher’s website:

AS AI GROWS IN UTILITY AND CULTURAL PRESENCE, SO DO QUESTIONS SURROUNDING THE HUMAN ROLE IN HOW OUR ART IS MADE.

WHAT DOES THE RISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MEAN FOR CREATIVE INDUSTRIES? 

As digital technologies in language modeling and generative visualization become increasingly sophisticated, questions about originality and the role these emerging tools play in art and culture take crucial positions in not just today’s discourse, but for generations to come. 

In a collection of essays and interviews from Jesse Damiani, I Create Like the Word explores these topics through expert panels of AI developers, poets, artists, researchers, and curators — as well as through an ekphrastic process where original art and poetry weaves an exchange between human and machine, emphasizing the relationship between prompt and craft.

This places us at an emerging trailhead of poetics that asks us to face the role computers have within our own very ancient, very human traditions: the role of the poet and sublime expression. 

This title has received a grant from OpenAI, who also provided the underlying generative technology used in the creation of the book.