Abstract
“Robots would be starving artists if they tried to write literature or poetry,” John Cramer wrote about a Turing test for poetry. In my paper I will examine forms and functions of AI-generated poetry and discuss some of the aesthetic, formal, theoretical, and philosophical implications of this cultural form. Can AI compete with human poets (and should they)? What makes the poetic genre specifically suited to experiments in artificial intelligence, and where does it reveal the weaknesses of its theoretical assumptions? What are the pleasures and politics of reading AI-generated poetry? What happens if the reader of such poetry is no longer human but a machine? In my essay I aim to look at AI-generated poetry in order to pose larger questions about human-machine interaction in the arts, about posthumanist creativity, and about the future of writing and reading in an increasingly computational environment.
