Lyric Poetry in the Face of Posthumanism: An Analysis of Generative AI-Assisted Poetry Writing

Generative AI seems poised to transform a wide range of endeavors once thought to be solely the domain of humans—from journalism to legal practice to creative expression—into collaborative activities involving both human and machine. Poetry is no exception, as even general-purpose language models now routinely generate convincing emulations of poetic form. While researchers have closely examined such machine-generated poetry, few have studied human-AI collaboration in poetry writing from a posthuman perspective. Through semi-structured interviews with ten participants in an AI English poetry contest and an analysis of their dialogs with AIs, we summarize the affordances and challenges of such collaborative practice using posthumanism as a lens. We then expose interesting tensions, for example, between human self-expression and the diminished (or relocated) agency that AI collaboration often entails. This collaborative, yet often adversarial, process provides insights into the nature of the posthuman condition as regards creative collaboration between human and machine.