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Marc Alan Di Martino's avatar

I've so far been able to avoid the temptation to use AI, though I admit I haven't really felt very curious about it. Writing can be frustrating, especially when one is in a dry spell, but that too is part of the process. AI seems to grow out of our preoccupation with productivity, but that's antithetical to writing as I understand it. Unless you are churning out potboilers for mass consumption, but I don't think poets typically fit that type. All those things you mentioned - thinking, reflecting, falling in and out of focus, stepping back, setting aside, forgetting, remembering, reminiscing, pondering, lamenting, having an epiphanic moment, feeling lost, worrying yourself, feeling a sense of failure, feeling a sense of overcoming obstacles, getting to know yourself - are absolutely essential to the creation of art, and to strip the creative process of them seems to me pointless, a complete misunderstanding of what we are trying to do in the first place. It's not unlike the sex pill in Barbarella. Soma, anyone? It's a shortcut to a feeling, the feeling of having done something (which you actually didn't do). Thanks for the engaging posts, Mark!

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Tom Barlow's avatar

I wrote my interactions with AI as a found poem yesterday, and now I'm wondering how it measures up to your thoughts.

My Conversations with Ai

Explain stink bait for fishing

did any livestock die of the plague

that killed millions in the 14th century

Ten words that have changed their

primary meaning since the 1960's

Behaviors of crass old men

Who are the five most esteemed American poets today

What is the best sniper's rifle

Who were the most famous agony aunts

Summarize his vision of heaven in

Swedenborg's heaven and hell

Name ten banal elements of American culture

What odd things are deep-fried at the fair

What contemporary singers do elitists dislike

Is chintz used for curtains

Best-known antipsychotic drug

Common diner waitress names

spell the town of pookipsee

Which weapon is more commonly mentioned in books—

a potato in a sock or an orange in a sock

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Mark Danowsky's avatar

~ Searching to Search ~

This reminds me of a concept (or game, or writing prompt) -- Every time you think to Google something (which now might mean "GPT something" ... ok we need a better phrase... that's why OpenAI should have picked a sexier name... Perplexity is better... ) ... Let's start over. Every time you think to Google (search) or "Perplex" (AI search) something, instead, write it down in your Notes app (or related... like a scratch pad (generational IYKYK)). At the end of a week's time, look at the list of things you thought to look up and see if you're still interested in "knowing" the answer. Were they questions? Do you ever remember why you wanted to know? Did I really need to know if that basketball player was listed as 6'11" or over 7'0" tall? (No, obviously not.)

You're still allowed to search for things that are important (hopefully goes without saying... but try to catch yourself when you know that it is not actually that important) ... the goal here is, in part, to teach yourself to break the habit of searching to search.

To be continued... this requires a follow-up post :)

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Michael T. Young's avatar

Great reflections on this current situation. You articulate exactly what I've said and felt about this from the beginning honestly (but more clearly), i.e., we lose so much when we "hand over the keys" to AI. And the degeneration of cognitive skills is already pretty clear. I fear it will only decline precipitously as people because less cautious about its use. At some tipping point they won't even have the capacity to imagine the dangers, the loss. That is, they will have lost the faculty that perceives the loss itself.

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Mark Danowsky's avatar

Well said, especially your outshot. This is likely going to be another sleep creep situation where abilities erode at a pace just slow enough that we're not entirely aware of what is happening until it's difficult to claw back.

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Jean Mikhail's avatar

Blech. I would never use AI to write a poem. I look words up all the time, try to get a more well rounded understanding of that word with Google, etc., but to use AI to write a poem or even an essay…no. At the college where my husband teaches, the college prez wants to cut composition instructors and have students use AI because who needs to think critically anymore?

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Mark Danowsky's avatar

It's sad given critical thinking (and civics) is precisely what we need more of in schools/classrooms now more than ever.

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Jean Mikhail's avatar

Yes, agreed. If you’ve ever watched PBS’s documentary on the Civil War, you probably remember the letters written by the soldiers and recited on the program. The writing was so eloquent, so moving. So much of our purposeful communication, our ability to express ourselves in complex ways has broken down over time.

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Sara Castaneda's avatar

Such a great thing to think about. I recently edited a book that had a lot of incomplete thoughts in it. Sometimes I could understand where the writer was going but couldn't figure out how to frame a suggestion. I did turn to AI once to bounce off an idea and the response was so ...clinical. It did not sound like the person I knew at all. I never used it as an assistant again. I realized by knowing the writer it gave me way more insight in a suggestion then AI ever could. That was my one and only experience.

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Mark Danowsky's avatar

Sounds like you got lucky, in a way, with the negative first experience. I may have been on the other end of the spectrum being almost too impressive by the capabilities for AI to [seemingly] expedite my thought process.

It's only in recent weeks that I've been doing less AI searches... I think the charm has worn off and I became increasingly aware that I was not retaining the information from quick searches that seemed urgent but were in fact not.

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Sara Castaneda's avatar

It's such a hard thing to try to understand. On the one hand it can help in some ways. It can be a great assistant in helping you schedule your calendar or for brain dumping and trying to get certain points organized from that chaos. But then, other things....I don't know. People 50 years from now will look back and think how rudimentary we were in trying to understand how to/how not to incorporate it in our lives.

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Mark Danowsky's avatar

Oh yes, I'm sure it will seem utterly ridiculous (on many levels) how we're handling this in hindsight...

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Catherine Gonick's avatar

What does LLM stand for? Thanks. AI seems good for what we used to call "boilerplate."

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Mark Danowsky's avatar

LLM = Large Language Model

By comparison, I like references to the human brain/mind as a SLM (small language model) as we have limited processing capabilities... until we get those chips in our head that allow for storage updates...

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