ABSTRACT
While poetry and technology are not usually thought to go together, poetic language is among humanity’s earliest and most enduring inventions – a reliable data storage system for knowledge and meaning enabled by meter, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and other ingenious devices. This chapter considers the arrival of a major software update, AI-powered poetry, within the historical context of automated writing and human–machine co-authorship, and suggests that autopoesis via natural language processing can generate valuable, semantically viable literary artworks (and fresh interpretations of classic texts) that help us better understand and navigate our increasingly posthuman condition.
