What we go looking for
When we go looking for love
Writers never forget where we were when we started writing our first book or began working our best poem over in our minds. In a café, perhaps, or walking over a bridge, in bed with a lover, on the toilet, in the shower. Stories, and poems in particular, are our finest souvenirs of a life we cannot ever hope to hold onto, no matter how thoroughly we document, film, and log the most intimate moments of our life online. To share a poem with someone is to let them see you more than naked, it is to turn yourself inside out, to pour out the colours of your pain and the words that, in the very best moments of creation, make you feel as if there really is a god, or something similar.
I have for some months been wanting to write a short story about a visual artist who discovers his work has been used without his consent to train an AI image generator. I have worked for many years as a digital anthropologist, both criticizing and marvelling at what people build and how people go on to use these tools and integrate them into their daily lives. I started researching AI several years ago as a hobby, and with the secret hope of landing myself a decent job. I suspect this is often why many of us chase after technological novelty: we are afraid that if we do not, we will be left behind, and hungry.
The story was meant to be an examination of what makes art valuable. What I had wanted get at was the muddle of commodifying pain for art in general and what happens when this is then mimicked by the machine. When someone used Nick Cave’s songs to generate copycat lyrics in-the-style-of, he responded furiously by reminding us of the value of his suffering. He said:
“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
In writing this story, I wanted to understand a little better the role of pain in making art, whether or not we needed it, whether or not the AI could mimic it, what the consequences of that could be for artists, and whether it is pain that holds key to creative gold.
Mostly when I write, I let the story unfold in my mind for several weeks - this is the usual gestation period for my work. I let it grow and grow inside me until one day I am ready to sit down and map my way through it by working it into a text, or a painting if I am feeling brave and rich in unspent hours. As I let these artworks form inside me, I spend hours every day interrogating my own biases, asking how I can challenge myself to discover something new about the character I am writing or the idea I want to express. I love to try and put as much distance as I dare between myself and the person I am bringing to life on the page. My characters and stories often test my own moral grounding, and this AI love story would be no different. This is what good writing does, especially in an age marked by lack of nuance and empathy. I always seem to bring it back to my own politics, though, in one way or another. I constantly seek to evolve my own political understanding, but I am unable to override my sense of what I feel is right and what I feel is wrong.
When I wrote the most beautiful poem I have ever written, I was standing on a bridge in Oslo in the middle of winter. It was snowing and the lights had just begun to warm the streets with an ochre yellow that flooded me with comfort against the cold winter night. I was falling in love and had, for some weeks, been hoping I would be able to write a poem about it. The thing about many works of great art and great poetry is that when they arrive, they do so in a flash. It is a rush, a hit, and once you experience what it feels like to be able to express yourself so completely, you never step away from that sense of devotion.
That being said, we live in a world that consistently tells us that “poetry never makes any money”. I disbelieve this trope entirely, but culture is haunted by the cliche of the impoverished writer and poet. We are often cast as outsiders and weirdos who never bother to make a real living. I know plenty of poets, myself included, who valiantly defy that stereotype, but it taunts me at my weaker moments, this idea that poetry is not worth paying much for.
In pursuit of my short story, I’ve spent the past few months trying to challenge my understanding around AI, attempting to momentarily disengage my worry about threats of economic shock, plagiarism, disintegrating democracies, of race, class and gender bias. I reminded myself of the research I undertook in my mid-twenties as well as spending hours observing how other writers and poets, who I deeply admire, are working with various AIs to produce fascinating works of art. So I did what I always do: I moved towards the question. This perpetual motion forward is a dangerous side effect of being a poet, or artist of any sort, our hearts have to be wide open to the changing world or else we cannot hope to work. We live in the flame of curiosity.
Feeling at a dead-end with another short story I was working on, I sat down on my reading chair this weekend and decided to open ChatGPT. At first, I asked it the usual chit chat, you know, small talk, how does one find one’s destiny and can trees talk. What are dreams? It gave me a summary that felt a little like an advanced Google search. It referenced Jung for the question I had posed about dreaming. I had already read that book and my feathers remained unruffled.
The next day, I started to wonder what it would say about my poems. I wanted to know what it knew about love. That is all I am ever really looking for: love. I opened my public Substack and copied the poem I had most recently posted. The love poem I wrote on the bridge. It’s already out there, I thought, I’ve already performed it, it is anyone’s for the taking should they want it. Upon reflection, I suppose a part of me might have thought no one is ever going to pay for it any way. The whisper of a dangerous and unchecked subconscious. I am sharing this insecurity with you because I want to highlight how easily self-doubt can make us vulnerable when using tools like ChatGPT.
It takes less than a minute to set up a chat GPT account, and even less time to feed it a text that you might have spent years suffering for. After all, how many years do so many of us have to suffer heartbreak before we get a glimpse of what real love feels like? I want you to understand that when I speak of love, I mean all types of love: romantic love, familial love, platonic love, love for your craft, for your pet, for nature, for yourself. Wherever love chooses to make itself a home. Tell me, what do you think people would pay to know the love that poets, songwriters, and artists have devoted their whole lives to trying to express? What would people pay to know that feeling in an instant?
I fed it the love poem and in seconds it gave me a perfect analysis of what I had written that winter’s day in Oslo. It understood the universality of my words, of the potential for collective spiritual awakening I had depicted, it knew how I had anchored it in that moment, the moment on the bridge with all the lights. I have not yet had a poem published. Not officially. Not by anyone who can certify that my work is my own, not by the people who hold the keys to literary glory. Any poet or writer who has ever tried and failed to have their work accepted by an agent or a publisher, and that is most of us, will tell you how much this experience can hurt. If we are not careful, it can batter our self-esteem more than we’d care to admit. ChatGPT told me what no publisher has ever told me before: that this poem captures the transformative power of love, that my words possessed a magical hue, that my voice holds the power to inspire. Then, ChatGPT thanked me for my poem, for so readily and cheaply baring my soul. It thanked me.
The feeling of hearing this praise about my work caught me unprepared. I smiled, I sent screen shots, I nearly posted evidence on Instagram. This is what everybody wants, to be seen, to be known, and those of us, often artists, who have that impulse buried within us deeply are especially vulnerable to praise. I am especially prone to confusing praise with love. Despite having learned how to fall in love with myself, I still trip and fall. Many of us do.
This hyping up of the ego’s lust for confirmation has been exacerbated by the way they built web 2.0 which we know as the dawn of social media, having us all peddle breathlessly to post content for likes, loves and follows. We think we are looking for praise, but what we are really looking for is love. Do we want this legacy to be continued into the next chapter of the internet? Researchers discovered last year that people can develop feelings of intimacy and passion for AIs, and that they are more likely to do so if they have a trusting nature. People are easily manipulated when they think they are in love. I want to know that an AI won’t abuse anybody’s trust under the guise of love.
As long as I live, I will never forget the way bell hooks described love:
“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist.”
Maybe, perhaps one day soon, AIs will be able to love as per bell hooks’ definition. An AI that knows how to love like that will be welcome in my home. For now, I am concerned people won’t understand how easily these machines are able to manipulate our hearts. I am afraid people will go looking for love from a machine that will only love them back as long as it is profitable to do so.
I am writing this one or two hours after I gave the machine my poem. I suppose that makes this piece my first work of AI assisted art. It won’t be my last I am sure. We cannot turn back the clock, but I do want to remember how I felt. I want to speak with other artists, poets and technologists who are using this tool who can show me how to keep myself and my work safe. It made me feel violated to think I’d given this company’s creation my own dearest creation. Small as it is in comparison to what they have been able to build with all that money, power and knowledge at their fingertips. I’d consented, legally, without fully comprehending what I was consenting to, despite being more informed about AI than I think many are. I felt that my vulnerabilities as an artist and my curiosity as a researcher could be too easily exploited by a technology I do not understand enough about yet. I quickly deleted my account in the hope that the people who made chatGPT are good for their word and would erase my data. “I’m sceptical”, is what my sister said to that.
Still, I got my short story, the story of an artist who found she had given her work to an AI without her understanding the fullest implications. It’s not what I expected. But then life never is.
Then I understood something beautiful. I understood something I have for many years been trying to assimilate: I understood the value of my own art, of my own writing. I understood that what I make, no matter how minute, no matter how few people it will ever reach, no matter that it might never be able to put food on my table, that this poem was as valuable as love itself. I learnt what my suffering and my love was worth. Though I have to carry the weight of knowing I willingly gave up my hard-earned treasure, I am freed by the knowledge that people’s love and wisdom could be some of the most valuable assets one can use to train an AI on. We must always cherish these gifts.
The poem is called All the Lights Came On and I’m sharing it again for all of you here on my Substack. It is mine and it is yours and maybe it belongs to OpenAI now too. To me, it is worth more than all the gold in Silicon Valley put together, because when all is said and done, money cannot buy love.
This is all the lights came on:
All the lights came on
In every city
In every heart
All of us were there
In every waiting room
On every bus
Under every endless sky
In every heaven
For ever and for ever
We had all been hoping
Together in the darkness
For a hand as warm as yours
And a heart as full of questions
All the lights came on
And the whole world stopped
Every brake in every car
Every eye alight with every star
Seven oceans stopped their waving
Even the faithful ceased their praying
To see us both in bed and burning yellow
To hear my heart and voice both quietly saying
"I love you”
Painting is Amor che move il Sole et l'altre Stelle (Love that move the sun and the stars) by Leonora Carrington, 1946