Posthuman Creativity: Poetry and Artificial Intelligence
November 9, 2022, 19.30
Literaturhaus Hamburg, Schwanenwik 38, 22087 Hamburg
Visions of artificial intelligence (AI) and independently thinking machines, and the utopian (or dystopian) futures that such technologies herald, have long been driving computer science and science fiction. Today these imaginings have come closer to becoming a reality. Modern AI can already perform many of the tasks that humans can – sometimes even better. It has, for instance, learned to understand and translate languages, design buildings, diagnose illnesses – and to write poetry.
Generative poetry has a tradition going back to the 1960s, yet the peculiar uncanniness of machine writing has kept it from a broader literary audience. However, since the arrival of modern AI, computers have become capable of producing poems barely distinguishable from those written by humans. Furthermore, poems can be performed in machine-generated voices, set to machine-written music, or transformed into machine-made video clips. Has AI really mastered artistic creativity, long thought to be a uniquely human ability that machines could never attain? Or does the human poet who trains and runs the algorithm still remain the true author of these poems? This event will be held in German.
With
Zuzana Husárová (Poet and performer, Bratislava/Slovakia)
Dr. Wiebke Vorrath (Literary Scholar, PoetryDA)
Moderator: Vadim Keylin, PhD (Cultural and sound scholar, PoetryDA)
Tickets for the event can be bought at the Literaturhaus.