Code of Holes
Over the summer of 2020, my friend got their hands on a pilot version of the controversial language model GPT-3, and indulged me by running fragments of my own poetry and existing poems by writers I admired through the machine, generating text for me to work with. It was all rather astounding and addictive and I looked for a way to work with it directly, since I couldn't have access to the real thing (it was only for researchers at the time). Through that research I found out that a game called AI Dungeon, which is a browser-based text roleplaying game, supposedly used GPT-3 as the basis for its premium version, and you could use it to generate texts if you paid the $9/month. So I started making poems using AI dungeon, dodging its role-play-ish verbiage most of the time and trying to get it to present some far-out truths, which it did.
One of my early experiments was the basis for the first poem here, CODE OF HOLES – the game started describing light as a "code of holes" which I found rather dharmic and spooky and appealing. I then took the text generated by interacting with the AI dungeon game and did a Burroughs-style cut-up to it, then edited it into something pithier. Instead of presenting it on a page in the normal way, I justified it in a square and used black emoji as a form of punctuation, since I think it emphasizes the code/hole content motif.
The second poem is about having sex with Kylie Jenner. I had a dream I had sex with her in a beach vacation setting surrounded by family, and it included an obscene squirting element. When I woke up I wrote out the dream in order of its events to turn it into a poem but it was too linear, just sounded like badly written erotica. So I ran that text through an algorithm that mimics Bourroughs-style cutups and suddenly it was turned back into a dream, like the cutting and scrambling allowed the dream logic came to the surface again. Bonsai-tree-style pruning and editing followed. There's an influence of the poet Bernadette Mayer here too who worked a lot with dreams and dream logic in her work.
The third piece, THE FUTURIST, came out of my original experimentation with GPT-3 via my friend. I had asked if GPT-3 could write poetry, and they said yes, but epic poetry, because it did better with longer text samples. Inspired by this, I sent over the first few pages of The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley, a feminist epic poem and one of my all time favorite books.
The proceeds from this work will be redistributed to queer, trans, experimental and undersupported writers as the first step of the DELUGE BOOKS DAO.
