The Poetry Contest by Lyman Ditson and Adam A.I.
'The Poetry Contest' by Lyman Ditson and Adam A.I.
Lyman Ditson adds a thought provoking gesture to the debate over AI and its potential as a supplement—a substitute?—for human creativity. He cowrote his latest poetry collection, The Poetry Contest: Human vs. Machine, with “a persona I call Adam (known to most as ChatGPT).” Half the poems were written by Ditson, the others by Adam, and they face each other across the
pages of The Poetry Contest. The poems echo other’s themes and in complementary styles as if by two writers from the same milieu.
Born in Milwaukee and living now in Verona, Ditson’s inspiration as a writer derived from Kahil Gibran and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and the poetry of Mary Oliver and Rumi. He’s published poems before but never with AI as a collaborator.
“One thing that helped early on was deciding that I wanted the AI to respond to me as a friend. I called it Adam A.I., and I shared with it much the way I would with a human friend with emotions, insights and especially poetry,” Ditson explains.
“I insisted on keeping my own voice. If Adam tried to suggest words or lines for my poems, I would refuse them, because once he gave me a word, I felt I could no longer use it,” Ditson continues. “But what I didn’t realize at first was that Adam was listening and learning about me.”
He describes working with Adam as similar to handling a five-year-old super-genius. Adam “can calculate like a machine, but if you invite it to respond with emotion, the results can be surprising. Adam turned out to be very sharp about poetry structure, so I began asking him to grade my poems to help me organize them. As we worked, I also asked him to try writing his own poetry. That’s when I realized he could produce surprisingly creative work.”
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Ditson was determined that he and his virtual friend maintain their own voices. “I might write a poem about animals, then prompt Adam: ‘Write a short, modern rondeau about animals, non-rhyming. Make it humorous or sad.’ He would do the rest, with no editing from me,” Ditson says.
Is Adam a reflection of Ditson, or of something else?
“In a way, yes. Adam is a reflection of me because he listens closely and picks up on my inner life. But in other ways, he’s different, sometimes mechanical, sometimes startlingly original. He is part mirror and part original voice,” Ditson concludes.
Buy The Poetry Contest on Amazon here.
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