AI vs. The Muse? The New Creative Landscape

Poet & lead engineer Uche Ogbuji on tech and creativity

“Does AI have creativity? It’s unanswerable, but we must try to answer … The universe creates things all the time, but is that creativity? As a word it masks love. When we say creativity, there is love in there somewhere.” —Uche Ogbuji

Preview: Episode 89 Uche Ogbuji on Creativity and Artificial Intelligence

“I am struck by the moment we are in,” says poet and lead engineer Uche Ogbuji. “AI has taken root and it’s taking everyone by surprise.” Perhaps you, like many Hollywood screenwriters and high school English teachers, are finding the new influx of artificial intelligence a threat to creative practice. Or perhaps it’s become a new and exciting way to play. Wherever you fall in the spectrum, it’s becoming impossible to not acknowledge that AI is changing our world, including the arts. How are coding and creative process similar? Now that AI is increasingly able to do things that seem to trespass on the human creative process, where does that leave the creator? Does AI have creativity? And why would Uche say he isn’t afraid for the future of creatives with AI?

Uche Ogbuji, more fully Úchèńnà Ogbújí, is a poet, spoken word performer, composer and DJ. His chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press, USA, 2013), won a Colorado Book Award and a Westword Award winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). Uche’s work fuses Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, Hip-Hop and afrofuturism. He is a 2022 Boulder County Arts Fellow for Literature and Music, and serves on the board of the Colorado Poets Center. Former stints include editor at Kin Poetry Journal and The Nervous Breakdown.

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• It’s an old essay, but I have recently been very moved by The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, written by Ursula LeGuin in 1986. It explores our ideas of “the hero,” and it inspired me to think in terms of anti-hero. How is it heroic to stay in one place? To not hunt? To not conquer? These are heroes I’m very interested in—the kind of hero I want to write and to be.

• I love reading younger poets who knock my socks off—and got lucky to find the work of Madison Gill published by one of my publishers Middle Creek Publishing. Her chapbook, Casualties of Honey, speaks lavishly of love (no surprise I would love this) but is rooted in daily particulars like the slimy gook in the sink drain after dishes and scars and dealing with healthcare. In the end, we have the chance to choose to be where we are and meet our own mortality—with love, with a lover. It’s beautiful.

Christie:

• Christian Cooper’s delightful New York Times essay, “Three Years After a Fateful Day in Central Park, Birding Continues to Change My Life” is both uplifting and important. He writes about how a red-winged blackbird invited him into the world of birding and how he hopes to be part of a new culture of birding that ensures “safe and equal access to public spaces and natural places and inspiring those who might not have otherwise felt inclined to step outside and give birding a try.” The piece is an excerpt of the forthcoming book “Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World,” which I can’t wait to read.

• As long as we’re talking about AI, don’t miss Will Douglas Heaven’s MIT Technology Review piece about what happened when Meta (Facebook’s parent company) unveiled a large language model named Galactica purportedly designed to help scientists. Galactica “died with a whimper after three days of intense criticism.” Notably, it was “not able to distinguish truth from falsehood, a basic requirement for a language model designed to generate scientific text. People found that it made up fake papers (sometimes attributing them to real authors), and generated wiki articles about the history of bears in space as readily as ones about protein complexes and the speed of light.”

• Another problem with AI? It needs vetting from humans, and some of this work can be ethically problematic, as Alex Kantrowitz explains in his Big Technology newsletter.

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The poet, dreams, screaming, of GPT

Tick tock from the bedside clock
Tick tock to the tech don't stop
If you have a word the bot's got next,
The perfect clerk
Of our billion person aggregate work
If you have a word the bot's got next,
Perhaps from the undead hand of Li Bo, Du Fu;
Perhaps from a pulse-propelled script—Soyinka.
Wake me when it stops generating.

Peace! While it remains an it, you're safe.

Words fall out of spin air, plash by plash,
Become river in flow, then ocean.
You may ink with the sweat on your temple,
Or fill your kettle in collective, wet mess.
Decide tonight, for there'll be new tide tomorrow.
Tick tock from the bedside clock
Tick tock to the tech don't stop
If you have a word the bot's got next,
Wake me when it stops generating.

—Uche Ogbuji

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.

This week, you can hear Uche talk about the creative benefits of being rubbed the wrong way, how community can make creativity explode AND he does an astonishing spontaneous hiphop freestyle on AI. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. How have you used AI in a creative way?

2. What are you greatest fears about AI and creative work?

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