Maybe there’s no better way to start discussing this matter than to read a poem. Let’s start off with “The Invention” by the English poet Philip Larkin:

Money is a thing you earn by the sweat of your brow
And that’s how it should be.
Or you can steal it, and go to jail;
Or inherit it, and be set for life;
Or win it on the pools, which is luck;
Or marry it, which is what I did.
And that is how it should be, too.
But now this idea’s come up
Of inventing money, just like that.
I ask you, is nothing sacred?

Here we find Larkin’s lyrical clarity, which he’s famous for: the entire poem is written in direct, ordinary language. Take note also of his signature wit present throughout the poem, as well as the quiet, ironic reflection at the end — playful and pessimistic at the same time, classic Larkin.

Except that the poem isn’t Larkin’s. It was generated by an early OpenAI program prompted to write a poem about cryptocurrency in the style of Philip Larkin, a couple of months before OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

The unexpected speed and magnitude at which AI technologies have improved in the past few months have of course prompted artists, intellectuals, and normal people alike to ask questions about its artistic, intellectual, and social implications. Even Elon Musk, who was one of the founders of OpenAI, joined technology experts in their call for a global pause on AI development due to its potential and unforeseeable risks to society. (Musk, however, is reportedly planning to work on an AI technology that would rival OpenAI’s.)

Among artists, to whom poets belong, the key question has been whether AI technology can replace human creativity. It’s no surprise that the English mathematician Alan Turing, who famously devised a method of testing AI to determine if it can think like a human being, imagined posing this question to a computer: “Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.”

ChatGPT and its ilk pose an existential threat to poets. If computer algorithms can pen texts indistinguishable from the ones written by actual poets, what do we need poets for? Plato would surely be glad, for he’d get yet another reason to banish them from society.But remember that despite the long history of technological inventions, poetry has persisted and has had its own long history.

Poetry existed initially as an oral art form, but the invention of writing, and eventually printing, only made it more widely available. The early 2000s saw the emergence of poetic movements strongly influenced by the Internet, such as Flarf and alt-lit; their proponents — the poets Gary Sullivan and Tao Lin, to name a few — viewed the internet as both material and medium. In “Citizen: An American Lyric,” published in 2014, the American poet Claudia Rankine, drawing on the visual language of television and film, incorporates video stills and other graphic elements to create a hybrid literary work.

Although poetry’s popularity may be eclipsed by newer art forms and mediums, therefore, it will never be obsolete. The history of poetry is one of constant reinvention.There’s a reason why ChatGPT and similar AI programs are usually called “generative” instead of “creative.” They can only generate ideas from the data and the prompts they are fed with. They are, at least as of this writing, incapable of creating original ideas. They are simply good imitators.“The Invention,” the AI-generated poem I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, is only an imitation of Larkin, not and will never be Larkin’s. I assume that the moment you found out the poem was not Larkin’s but AI-generated, your attitude towards it changed. It may be akin to the feeling you will have if you discover that the designer bag or pair of sneakers somebody gave you is actually fake.The difference between your reaction toward a Larkin poem and a mere imitation of it is what lies at the heart of the aesthetic experience: an encounter with authenticity.

In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German critic Walter Benjamin argues that the mechanical and mass reproduction of art objects reduces their authenticity.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art,” he writes, “is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” For Benjamin the value of an artwork is “embedded in the fabric of tradition.” Its meaning is inseparable from and produced by the historical context and material conditions in which it was created. Using Benjamin’s criteria, what value can we get from a poem that is AI-generated? What did the AI program have to go through to be able to compose the poem? To illustrate this point let’s take “This Be The Verse,” a poem Larkin actually wrote:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

The poem tackles generational trauma. Larkin’s father Sydney was a Nazi-sympathizing disciplinarian. Of him Larkin wrote: “His personality had imposed that taut ungenerous defeated pattern of life on the family, and it was only to be expected that it would make them miserable and that their misery would react on him.” On the other hand, although Larkin also said unflattering words about his mother Eva, he maintained a close relationship with her. He wrote her letters twice weekly for more than 30 years.

All this probably explains why, despite the accusatory tone of the first paragraph of Larkin’s poem, it reveals an understanding, almost forgiving attitude in the second: your parents fuck you up because their own parents fucked them up as well. Hence the poem ends on a compassionate and poignant note: put an end to generational trauma by not bearing children.As readers we relate to the poem because we know an actual person wrote it and because we suppose that Larkin was able to express such emotions because of his own fraught relationship with his parents. A literary critic next to you may call this “intentional fallacy” or cite Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” but it’s undeniable that what we look for and appreciate in a poem or any work of art is a sense of shared humanity.Now ask ChatGPT to write a poem about generational trauma, and no matter how good it may sound, it will ultimately be false and hollow. It will lack authenticity. Why? Nobody fucked it up.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, ever the literary clairvoyant, might as well have been discussing texts generated by the algorithms of AI language models and not George Bernard Shaw’s work when he wrote: “If literature were nothing but verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book simply by practicing variations.”

According to Borges, texts produced via statistical prediction and combination, as what ChatGPT does, “lack value and even meaning.” Like Benjamin, Borges argues that literature is a “dialogue” and a “narration.” When we create art, we engage in a conversation with the artworks and artists that came before us, and in this process we write our place in history.A quote often attributed to Borges goes this way: “Art is fire plus algebra.” ChatGPT and other AI tools are just that: tools, algebra. They can never replace poets. As poets we may use them as devices, but in the end the value of our poems is generated by our own genuine dreams, fears, successes, and fuckups — by our authenticity, our fire.