Poetry first

There’s a scene in Brent Katz’s Josh’s Wedding that felt very familiar to me. It’s April 2022, and a group of old friends are getting ready for a wedding. One of the groomsmen, Dan Selsam, works at OpenAI. He pulls out his laptop to show them an early language model, months before ChatGPT comes out. They can ask it to write pretty much anything. They ask for a Philip Larkin poem. What comes back shocks them. Watch Josh’s Wedding

I recognised that impulse immediately. I wanted to try poetry early on, too, and I wanted to try it in more than one language. What would happen if I gave it a poem in Tamil and asked it to carry on? At what point would I hear the voice of the poem I’d given it, and at what point would I feel that somebody else had taken over? I was curious whether I’d hear that change in the same way in another language.

That curiosity became kavithAI. Kavithai means “poem” in Tamil. At Futureless Festival in Stockholm in 2022, I put poems people had written alongside passages a model had continued. We hung them up and read them aloud. I wanted to know whether people could hear where the writing changed hands, and whether knowing who wrote a line changed how they felt about it. kavithAI

I like that the friends at the wedding asked for a poem before anyone had told them what this thing was supposed to be useful for. There was a wedding to get dressed for. They wanted to hear what it could do with a line.