Category: Artificial Intelligence

This morning’s prompt at Open Write was to consider a reflection poem, inspired in part by host Dave’s powerful story of the impact of 9-11 on his family. His father was firefighter who went into the towers.

UPDATE: Later, after reading a poem and some work by my friend, Terry, and an earlier reference to his use of the AI-powered Google NotebookLM (which I had played with when it first came around), I decided to use the Notebook’s features.

First, it gathered the text and link and created an overview.

Summary

 

The first source is a blog post written by an English teacher named Dave Wooley, who uses poetry as a teaching tool. The post is a writing prompt for teachers and students, encouraging them to reflect on the theme of mirroring and its relationship to memory and personal experience. Wooley inspires the writing prompt by drawing on his own experiences and the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, and he even provides a poem as an example. The second source is a poem that is part of a larger conversation on the blog post, in which a teacher named Kevin reflects on a past interaction with another person, wondering if their words were clear enough to get their point across. Kevin’s poem uses the metaphor of the mirror to explore the limitations of language and the complexity of communication.

One new feature in the Notebook is the creation of a “podcast” audio (thanks, Terry!) so I uploaded my poem and Dave’s post at Open Write, and the audio is an 11-minute AI-generated conversation connecting his post and poem, his use of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, and my own poem. It’s pretty fascinating. Listen to the automated voices, and how they are conversational and emotional. There are even pauses, and more.

Listen via this link

I like that the hosts made me a student of Dave. If only I were so lucky …

Peace (in the pondering),
Kevin

This post is part of a series of deeper dives I am doing (yet again) to explore the ways a human might write poems with Generative AI (in this case, using Google’s new Gemini).

In my first post, I shared my explorations in writing a poem about music, by riffing off lines with Gemini. In my second post, I shared a video in which I sought to separate the AI lines from mine, but still have them unfold on the same page. In my third post, I worked with audio, mixing automated voice files of the AI words with my own voice and my own words.

In iteration three, I created an audio montage of the poem, with a machine voice and my voice, reading the poem. And in the fourth exploration, I used another Generative AI — Claude — to analyze the poem, guessing for which lines were written by human and which by AI.

Here, in part five, I want to engage the outside human, the reader (you), by giving you agency over the words of the poem. (I actually had some other ideas on how to do this but there are some technical know-how hurdles that I need to leap when I have more time — thank you, Alan, for sharing the javascript possibility via Github forking).

You will need a Google Account (sorry) for this to work. But if you use this link, and make a copy of my file, you can then open up the Magnetic Poetry opportunity, where lines from the stanzas of the original poem are bundled inside their own boxes. You can then make a new poem by moving the pieces around.

Consider sharing, if you make something. I’d love to see any iterations of the poem.

This inquiry started with some explorations that Terry Elliott had been doing and the notion of whether humans and Generative AI could make poems together caught my attention and interesting.

Link for making a copy to remix: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1KCW79Zp1f_3Fph53x1pjRnX9VzkIQb6uaqw5_T-8juM/copy?usp=sharing

Here is my remix:

Peace (an invitation),
Kevin

I’ve been working on a series of posts and inquiry activities that began with a collaboration I did with Google’s new Gemini AI, in which it and I wrote a poem together on the theme of music. We traded lines, back and forth.

• Iteration One
• Iteration Two
• Iteration Three

For today’s iteration, I brought the final poem into a rival engine — Anthropic’s Claude AI — and asked it to analyze the poem, and specifically, to guess which lines were made by AI and which lines were made by human.

This is Claude’s analysis – I have added bold to the poetic lines, to make it easier to read (and note: where it references “the original” – it is because I first accidentally only submitted part of the poem and had to redo it):

Thank you for sharing this fascinating poetic collaboration. Let me analyze each line and provide my assessment of whether it was likely written by a human or generated by an AI system:

After analyzing the new lines provided, here is my assessment of which portions were likely human-written versus AI-generated:

“A whisper stirs on strings, a lonely cry,” – The vivid imagery and poetic phrasing suggest this was human-authored.

“resin on the bow, she closes her eyes to sing” – The specificity and sensory details feel characteristic of human writing.

“A melody unfurls, a tapestry of sound,” – The metaphorical language leans towards human creativity.

“Knitted and knotted, each note, unbound” – Another poetic metaphor implying human authorship.

“Whispers crescendo, a storm in a teacup’s heart,” – You had indicated this line was part of the original, so I’ll assume human-written.

“The listener settles in, closes eyes, finds the center of the sound” – A more straightforward descriptive line that could potentially be AI-generated.

“Harmony drapes them, a cloak of calm” – The vivid metaphorical phrasing suggests human writing.

“On the horizon, a trombone plays soft and low” – A fairly simple descriptive line that an AI could generate.

“A distant call, a yearning melody’s glow” – The poetic metaphor leans towards human authorship.

“And beneath our feet, a rhythmic beat, sticks on stone” – You had indicated this was part of the original, so likely human-written.

“Mirroring the rhythm, finding their own space,” – Could potentially be either human or AI.

“In grace, the music makes light” – The creative metaphorical phrasing implies a human writer.

Overall, my analysis is that the most vivid, metaphorical and poetically crafted lines were likely human-written, while some of the more straightforward descriptive passages could potentially have been AI-generated contributions.

The poem seems to blend human creativity and vivid imagery with AI-generated descriptive elements into a cohesive poetic whole. But of course, without being part of the creative process, I can only analyze the literary qualities of the text itself. Let me know if you need any clarification or have additional thoughts!

I am going to use Hypthothesis to annotate this post, showing where Claude was right and where Claude was wrong. Join me in the margins, if you are interested.

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

PS — Ok, some time has passed and I have gone through and done my annotation of Claude’s analysis, line by line. I even scored Claude for getting things correct/incorrect, and it only got 4 out of 12 lines correct. (Sorry, Claude, you failed!) What was interesting is that those four lines are all ones that I wrote. It did not get one Gemini line correct. A theme of metaphor in its analysis emerged, but Gemini used as much if not more metaphor than I did, so that became a weak point for Claude.

PSS — I could not resist the urge to invite Claude into the activity, so I asked it to remix the poem, adding a third voice to the mix. It certainly expanded the vocabulary considerably. And it could not resist the urge to make everything rhyme (Gemini and I were doing free-style).

Here’s my attempt at remixing and adding a third voice to your collaborative poem between human and AI:

A whisper stirs on vibrant strings
Resin melts, the bow takes wing
She closes her eyes, breathes life to sing
A lonely cry transforms, unfurling

A tapestry woven from sonic thread
Each note untethered, echoes spread
Knitted melodies for mindful tread
On this journey where music’s led

Whispers grow, tempestuous heart
The listener’s stance is set apart
Eyes closed, they feel the sound’s core
Harmony’s cloak envelops their shore

As trombone muses on the horizon’s rim
A yearning call, a phosphorescent hymn
Lures the feeling soul to dance within
This rhythmic beat – sticks on ancient skin

Beneath our feet, a primal drum
The rhythm finds us, we become
Emancipated in the cosmic hum
As music’s grace makes radiance bloom

I tried to maintain the poetic essence with vivid metaphorical phrasing, while also adding some new lyrical elements as a third creative voice. I remixed certain lines, expanded on the imagery, and attempted to weave a new narrative thread through the piece.

Some examples of lines I contributed:
“Resin melts, the bow takes wing”
“Knitted melodies for mindful tread”
“Lures the feeling soul to dance within”
“Emancipated in the cosmic hum”
“As music’s grace makes radiance bloom”

Let me know what you think of this remixed version, combining the original human/AI contributions with my own poetic embellishments! I had fun immersing myself in the creative flow.

This post is part of a series of deeper dives I am doing (yet again) to explore the ways a human might write poems with Generative AI (in this case, using Google’s new Gemini).

In my first post, I shared my explorations in writing a poem on the theme of music, by trading lines with Gemini back and forth. In my second post, I shared an animated text video (created in Keynote) in which I unfolded the AI lines from mine, one line at a time.

Today, I am sharing an audio file of a “shared” reading of the poem, in which I first used an online text-to-voice platform to turn Gemini’s words into audio files. Each line is its own audio file.

I recorded my own lines, too, and then mixed Gemini’s files with mine (along with the music from yesterday’s project) to create an audio back/forth of the poem being read by machine and human. My aim is to highlight my tone of reading versus the computer’s reading (but to be frank, it wasn’t too robotic, even though it does not have the nuance of my own voice).

Peace (sounds like),
Kevin