AI Collaboration

Happy New Year everyone! I hope your year is starting well. Here’s the first poem I’ve written in 2023, accompanied by some AI generated Art (generated based on lines from the poem).

Generated in MidJourney with lines from the poem

A Tyranny of Symbols

We are like catapults casting symbols across a chasm

At war with abstractions

Where common sense is not so common

And the least common denominator is always left in the back alley to rot in the fifth of our own making.

For what reason did we choose the sounds and muscles that make the word love,

Or truth,

Or creature,

Or tide?

For language is a tide,

With words in and out of fashion

Eb, and flow,

Push, and pull,

All tides have a time of their choosing

And yet so many choose to attack the waters with fist and blade and hate,

Until knuckles are bloody at the long lingering task of

Control

Order

Sameness

Identity

What symbol flung upon your body or taken by choice has ever brought you wholeness

Instead of fracture?

This.

You

Are

That.

Lines in the sand for which we dare not cross

We collect symbols to adorn our naked bodies

Rather than recognizing our rapturous reality,

That

Are

Star

Stuff

We fling like catapults,

Into the dark,

Hoping for illumination

But instead,

We become,

Weapons of mutually assured destruction.

We set words on fire,

Arguing to unburden ourselves

Shift the load from our shoulders

And weigh down another

To slow their speech,

Their motion,

Their agency.

Grasp the sand,

Hold it tight,

Do not let slip a single grain

Or risk

Unmasking

The arbitrary

The finger pointing to the moon,

Is not the moon.

I recently started working with the AI art generator MidJourney. Many of you may not know this but I have Prosopagnosia (faceblindness) and so I don’t visualize things the way that many people do. I’ve always wanted to create beautiful visual art, and photoshop helped me to get part of the way there but I never felt like I could create something from my words in a way that made sense for others visually speaking. The cool thing about MidJourney is that I can take my own written work, poetry and prose, and create something visually unique.

I am looking forward to using MidJourney and potentially other AI software in concert with my writing in the future. There is so much potential to collaborate with AI and develop new and unique landscapes of thought and experience.

On that note, Everything in this post is directly inspired by one of my novels, my short stories, or my poetry. Often I simply entered lines of my poetry and the result are many of the more abstract imagines, such as the ship made of leaves, the teacup in space, and the skull rising out of the road.

Which are your favorites? Which ones do you think best represent my work? Leave your thoughts in the comments.