Desi discovered an AI tool that can generate poetry while researching for her digital art class as a second-year student majoring in fine art; she also wants to find ways to incorporate her interest in poetry. When she found the AI tool, she was transfixed by the possibility of collaborating with a nonhuman to push herself as a creator and writer. She was impressed with how it expanded her vocabulary and ways of thinking about the world; both made her feel more creative and gave her new ideas for projects that she imagined were far outside her ability.
Desi began experimenting wildly and produced a new range of poems in partnership with her AI tool. When her university held a creative writing showcase, she submitted several pieces for the juried show. Jury members caught wind of the fact that she was collaborating with an AI tool, and they, along with her classmates and her writing professor, began to debate whether or not she was the real author of these pieces. Did she deserve the credit, or did the AI tool that she used? Or was this a collaboration? These lines were very blurry, and nobody had a clear answer about who the real author was.
This question of who created the poetry became even more problematic when Desi did more research and learned that the tool was trained, using large amounts of poetry from creators who did not consent to using their works. Additionally, many poems the AI tool was trained on were copyrighted.
Desi came across a heated online debate between other poets on the topic of AI-assisted writing. Some argued that using AI without disclosure was artistic deception. “The value of my poems lay not just in the final piece, but in my experiences and the struggles that led me to shape it,” one person commented. Others suggested that AI is simply a new tool, like a thesaurus or rhyming dictionary, and artists play the role of curators who refine the AI's output. This second group didn’t see any need to disclose that their final poem was created, in part, by an AI tool. It stands on its own merits, regardless of the tools used to make it.
Desi was torn between these perspectives. She decided to experiment with different levels of transparency in her work. She provided detailed breakdowns of specific lines that were AI-generated vs those that were her own. For other poems, she provided footnotes stating that AI was used in the general creative process. She did not mention AI involvement in a couple of other poems. She wondered how audiences would react to each approach.
When invited to publish her AI-assisted poems, she needed help navigating copyright laws, which traditionally didn't account for AI creators. Desi needed a new framework to recognize and compensate for digital contributions.
As part of the showcase, Desi participated in an open mic night. She read some of the poems she created with her AI tool and explained her process and how the poems were created with the help of AI. She received a spectrum of questions from listeners impressed by the results and others who felt like she had cheated. It convinced Desi that she needed to be transparent when using AI. Doing that ensures that she respects her audience and engages in deeper conversations about how creativity evolves with technology's help.
What do you think?
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