Seedcorn 2024/25

In recent years, individual poets have explored co-writing poems with AI to respond to ethical questions around plagiarism, job security and AI’s impact on the quality of art. There has, however, been little work exploring the specific question of voice and grounded experience in human poetics and whether this can coexist with AI generated writing, as well as AI’s potential to, when programmed and designed intentionally, be representative of people from marginalised and minority backgrounds. Poets are specifically equipped to answer these questions and tackle AI’s role in communicating ideas, as poetry is a language based art form using ingenuity and creativity to articulate unique human experiences beyond everyday conversational language and natural speech rhythms.

This research will ask the question of what AI could look like in the creative sector if designed to help people, to be anti-racist and to meet access needs.   Within this project, poet and technologist pairs from Global Majority, LGBTQ+, working class and non-male backgrounds will create AI models for their work which aim to reduce biases and amplify wide-ranging perspectives. They will explore:

• The extent to which real world human experience is grounded in the ideas, thoughts and memories which inspire poetry, and whether AI can communicate the experiencing of a physical space.
• Whether the desire to create, be expressive and tell stories is unique to human consciousness, or whether AI can simulate this.
• Whether AI can be programmed without pre-existing societal biases in order to represent marginalised and minority people, co-creating work which effectively centres a diverse range of voices, including Global Majority, LGBTQ+ and feminist voices.
• Whether AI can help people and communities in a way which nurtures human creativity.

This project follows on from a previous Brigstow Funded Ideas Exchange Page Against the Machine. 

What will the project involve? 

Within this project poets, researchers and academics will co-create of multimedia forms of poetry (in writing, digitisation and live performance), essays, extracts and discussions.

The researchers will draw on the Welfare State International archive to consider ethical questions around AI’s ability to represent individuals and communities in the absence of physical and lived experiences. They will consider how Page Against The Machine can harbour connections with local communities through participatory activities, and represent a variety of different views, perspectives in order to involve members of the public in conversations around technology and creativity.

The work will include two public workshops, a national poetry and AI symposium, and an AI Wordsworth exhibition at Lyra Festival 2024.

Who are the team?

• Danny Pandolfi (Lyra Bristol Poetry)
• Rebecca Kosick (Bristol Poetry Institute, University of Bristol and Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster)
• Caleb Parkin (Former Bristol City Poet (2020-24) and University of Exeter)
• Deanna Rodger (Poet)
• Ralph Hoyte (Poet)
• Raina Greifer (Poet)
• Matthew Olden (Technologist)
• Shakara (Poet)
• Michael Marcinkowski (Kings College London)
• Vince Baidoo (Pervasive Media Studio resident)
• Francesco Bentivegna ( Digital Technology, University of Bristol).
• Katy Dadcz, (University of Bristol)
• Amy Spencer (MyWorld, Bath Spa University)