Sean Michaels on AI, Poetry, and the Future of Creativity

Riffing on Marianne Moore—writing poetry with a bot—and other imaginative acts

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In this week’s episode, TW publisher and founder Martha Nichols interviews author Sean Michaels about his 2023 novel, Do You Remember Being Born? (Astra/Penguin Random House). Sean is an internationally bestselling novelist and critic from Montreal. His past books include Us Conductors (2014) and The Wagers (2019).

Sean Michaels © Julie Artacho

He’s received many awards for his work, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and two National Magazine Awards. Sean has also written widely for various publications and founded the music blog Said the Gramophone in March 2003.

In this conversation, which took place last May, Martha and Sean discuss Do You Remember Being Born? and the many ways generative artificial intelligence (AI) intersects with creative writing. The novel’s main human character, a famous poet named Marian Ffarmer, bears an eerie resemblance to the real poet Marianne Moore, a modernist icon who became something of a celebrity herself toward the end of her life. However, Sean’s book is set in the present day and involves a fictional omnivorous tech company (one that also feels close to reality in Silicon Valley but is not an exact replica).

At the behest of this company, Marian Ffarmer enters into a collaboration—for a large fee—with Charlotte, a custom AI model, to produce a poem. In Do You Remember Being Born?, Charlotte the bot is more than a productivity tool. She’s a central character, too, and Marian has many back-and-forths with her via text on a screen. (The title of the novel comes from a question Charlotte asks the human poet.)

In developing his bot character, Sean told Martha he had to reckon with the difference between human consciousness and what bots can learn about us from the writing we do—a process that just might make them conscious themselves. He’s not a poet, he said, but produced “fictional poetry” for the novel meant to represent the collaboration of a human poet with AI. Many of the poetry stanzas in Do You Remember Being Born? riff on famous lines by Marianne Moore. (Sean noted that he tested his poetry with a reading group of poets to make sure it passed muster.)

This provocative conversation challenges writers (and listeners) to consider just what the imaginative act of creating a poem—or creating characters in a novel—entails. Is the process any different for a sophisticated AI? It’s a question that resonates as much as Moore’s famous contradiction in “Poetry”:

. . . the result is not poetry,
   nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
      the imagination”—above
         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
   it.

Podcast production for this episode was provided by Sarah Tulloch and her podcast production company, CCST.

For more about Sean Michaels, visit his website.  

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