By Robert Minicucci, Certified Listener Poet, Cohort 10
“The technology is not the art. In the end, it’s about the person’s creativity and vision… Whenever there’s a new technology, there’s that moment of drunkenness… Then you sober up…”
- Paola Antonelli, MOMA curator and director of research and development, quoted in The New York Times’ article, “Amid the A.I. Deluge, What Counts as Art?”
With the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence (AI), where does poetry fit in? How it is being influenced (or swayed) by the changing and growing digital environment we live in?
AI is now a large part of our “present technocultural landscape”—a term coined by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), which has been around since 1999. If you don’t know, the ELO is an international organization dedicated “to the investigation of literature produced for the digital medium.” The ELO works to promote the writing and reading of literature as it develops in our changing digital environment, including writers and artists, scholars, and developers.
AI & the “3Ds”
While exploring poetry, AI and technology, I found this Nov. 2024 study:
“AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably.”
Here’s something that is a tad concerning:
“ … in contrast to previous studies, people are now unable to distinguish AI-generated poetry from the poetry of well-known human poets, being more likely to judge AI-generated poems to be human-written and rating AI-generated poetry more highly along several aesthetic dimensions.”
AI has clearly enveloped the zeitgeist. If the media articles in my Google Alerts are to be believed, many people are convinced AI can help us be more productive, that will allow us to spend less time with the “3Ds” (dull, dirty, dangerous). We’ll be free to do more thoughtful work and less drudgery.
So where does that leave the poet? Some of us find that the 3Ds are what make poetry fun and meaningful when creating (maybe more the dirty and dangerous).
This Medium article supports this position. Its title? “AI Is Writing Poetry — And That Terrifies Me.”
“Poetry is the language of humans. If we let machines compose our poetry, we risk losing not only our voice, but our definition of what it means to be human. AI is a pattern imitator. … built to perceive structure, replicate form, and remix content swiped from a vast ocean of human writings. It can readily provide you with a haiku or sonnet, but what it gains in efficiency and form, it loses in authenticity.”
Yes poetry can lose its authenticity when automated by a bot. But the question of where AI and poetry fit together is now beside the point, according to Monica Storss, a Northeastern University researcher of emerging technology and creativity and a TGLP alum from Cohort 10 (more on that later).
“If you have used AI to do something as simple as ask basic questions, then you are engaging with an AI tool that has encountered poetry at some time,” she told me in a recent phone call. “The dataset underneath has already trained itself in poetry through accessing public data on the Internet—some of it is Open Source (in the public domain) and some from private work of authors.”
That last bit is considered stolen intellectual property, according to a major class-action lawsuit, which claimed that the company Anthropic pirated 7 million books to teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts. The preliminary settlement in September of this year involved Anthropic agreeing to pay a minimum of $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.
What Does This Have To Do With Creating Poetry?
Poets are people, intelligent, and emotional. And it’s important to point out that AI is not “intelligent.” The subtitle of a June 6, 2025 article in The Atlantic sums it up quite nicely:
“… Despite what tech CEOs might say, large language models (AI) are not smart in any recognizably human sense of the word.”
“People have trouble wrapping their heads around the nature of a machine that produces language and regurgitates knowledge without having humanlike intelligence… (L)arge language models take advantage of the brain’s tendency to associate language with thinking … But there is no mind there, and we need to be conscientious to let go of that imaginary mind we have constructed.”
All Art Has Been Contemporary
AI is here to stay. It has become a part of how we learn and work. But if we understand its benefits and limitations, it can open a world for creativity—as it has for a range of AI literary journals:
Re•mediate, the goal of which, according to editor P.D. Edgar, is to “invite conversation and experimentation around the use of computers in creative writing.”
AI Literary Review, a quarterly non-profit journal based in the UK, which works “to document and support the development of poetry in a post-GenAI (Generative AI) world.” Submission guidelines explicitly say they look for “…poems written by humans, where AI tools have formed one part of the creative process.”
Ensemble Park, which “collects literary experiments in human-computer co-writing. Neither completely computer-generated nor absent of computational intervention, the works explore how machines may enter the literary process iteratively, and how literary artifacts may be changed by such iterations.”
Pale Fire, a magazine at the intersection of artificial and human intelligence.
ELO’s Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 5 (ELC5), opened its call for submissions in early November.
Regardless of what you think or feel about it, it’s here. And it can be a new way to create – and according to the Italian artist Maurizio Nannucci, “All art has been contemporary.”
Let’s Assemble and Discuss
On January 12, 2026, Monica and I are co-hosting a “Digital Open House” to explore our evolving technocultural landscape.
What’s your experience as a poet with AI? Has it crossed your radar? Are you a “technopoet?” Do you abhor AI? Come and share!
Send an email to rminicucci@outlook.com, and we will send you an invite.