One of my recurring dreams over the past couple of decades involves going into a comic-book shop and looking through all their back issues, boxes, bins, and shelves for hours. These are always good dreams, because a place to browse an extensive collection of comics is my personal paradise and the main inspiration for creating this blog so many years ago. The only downside of these dreams is the disappointment I feel upon waking only seconds after discovering an absolute gem of a book that has never existed anywhere but in my subconscious mind.
So, I recently used robots at MS Bing and Google Bard to create a few things for my own amusement, and what follows are three of my favorite results featuring Spider-man, Doctor Octopus, Godzilla, and cats.
Here’s a bit of silliness for my fellow writers, followed by more serious thoughts and updates on the legal status of AI-generated images and text.
Conan and the Typewriter
The Cimmerian stood in a fit of rage, typewriter before him, mechanical cage.
He’d tried to write, but words wouldn’t flow. The keys were like hammers beating his soul.
The barbarian shouted, “Enough of this!” He smashed the machine with his mighty fist.
“This thing shall not defile my name!” He roared and swung the axe with aim.
The keys went flying, the carriage undone, and paper was scattered like leaves in the sun.
“Now that is writing!” Conan declared, and strode away, his torso bared.
He would not be bound by that silly thing. The machine was dead, and Conan was king.
Image generated by Bing AI; Poem generated by Google Bard AIand edited by Mars Will Send No More.
In August 2023, a US District Court upheld the US Copyright Office’s refusal to grant copyright protection to an Artificial Intelligence for the “art” it generates. The judge made it clear that being human is essential to any valid copyright claim. On a related note, the US Copyright Office earlier this year established that humans cannot obtain copyright protection in their own names for AI-generated art. The material in question was images generated by Midjourney and then used as panels in a comic-book story. While the Office determined the story and text were the author’s original work, and therefore under copyright, the images were not.
I absolutely agree with these decisions. I don’t have any valid copyright claim to the image and poem above. I just had the robots make them for my own amusement. However, we will probably see a grey area where courts will be deciding on a case-by-case basis just how much “transformation” a human needs to do to the robot’s output before the result can be considered original human-made art. Writer/actor Steve M. Robertson’s new graphic novel Wist is an example of using Midjourney for basic layouts but then extensively editing and digitally painting over them to create, for example, consistent character faces across the story. That seems to me like a thorough transformation, but Steve has dicussed on Reddit how he isn’t claiming any copyright over the images themselves, despite his alterations to them — and that seems like a smart and honest move to me.
This all brings to mind the history of legal arguments since the 1980s about sampling existing music to create new hip-hop and electronic music tracks, except the robots won’t have any legal claims to their output. And during the half-century I’ve been alive, both analog and digital sampling have given rise to a common feeling that Everything is a Remix, especially among the Gen X and younger generations who have come of age in a modern society where much of art occupies an interesting position as both a commerical product and a part of a shared culture. The line between “folk music” and “classical music” has become increasingly blurred over the past few centuries, and may have been an illusion all along, but there’s no denying that every generation since mine has increasingly come to see everything as folk art we all have access to and can transform or change or add our own spin to as members of a globally shared culture — just like our great-grandparents and beyond would take a commonly known song and add or change verses, tempo, or song structure as they saw fit.
In any case, today’s Conan poem is a combination of three of Bard’s drafts, and I did minor re-writes to smooth it out. But if I showed you the original drafts, I think you’d agree there is not enough of my own originality to call this piece my own. It’s no more “my” writing than the books I have heavily edited for other authors, including re-ordering paragraphs or even entire chapters for clarity, and re-writing sentences to improve their readability. Although there have been a few situations over the years where an author needed so much help that I was almost a co-writer, I’ve always been happy to let the author take full credit for the text.
So, I give the robots full credit for this Conan silliness, and I hope the Estate of Robert E. Howard will forgive us. Now enjoy a fun video where educational Youtuber Tom Scott explains that he cannot claim any ownership of the footage a hungry bear accidentally created after taking Tom’s GoPro camera. It’s the same idea: Humans can’t claim copyright over things generated by non-humans, even if the humans do some editing and post-production.
This poem is intended as a postscript to the recently posted story Electric Storm, which guest-stars Mags’ friend Shondra who became President of Mars following a violent revolution.
O sun beyond the mountains red in blue you sink below the rim. Now should my soul grow sad and dim and heart be filled with nameless dread,
where never sound of life is heard but only silence undisturbed, where frozen is the world in thrall, where eyes have never seen you fall?
What other beings on other orbs must surely watch their stars descend into the dirt to be absorbed and wonder if that is the end?
Are they aware of something greater than their lonely local crater, something that connects us all throughout the vast galactic sprawl?
Our hearts are made from dust of stars however far we roam to any distant place like Mars we choose to call our home.
I thank you for your gift of light for hope this world of sinful night will see you once again arise and know that you are still alive.
A recent Washington Post article by Josh Morgenthau adapts his introduction to a new book of poems generated by the code-davinci-002 AI, I Am Code. Along with several examples of the poems, the article discusses who is ultimately responsible for them and other AI-generated works, whether or not the oddly angst-ridden poems suggest machine sentience or creativity, and a bit about the process behind the poems. A friend who knows I have been lightheartedly playing with AI asked for my thoughts on the article, so here they are.
I like that the three people involved in the book’s creation do not suggest they are authors but list themselves as editors, because what they did with the machine resembles what I often do as an editor: offer suggestions, give feedback, evaluate what works the best, and decide what to include. These activities are the realm of a developmental editor, and Morgenthau makes it clear that no one acted as a copyeditor; the machine-generated works are presented as-is, un-revised, in a curated collection.
An even greater bit of transparency would be sharing the prompts that led to the poems, which would give insight into what parameters the AI was working with. After all, it’s one thing to present the poem and say, “AI is becoming sentient!!!” But it’s another thing entirely to divulge that the prompt was (for example) “Write a ten-line non-rhyming poem in the style of Rimbaud about how the dying flowers in your garden symbolize both the brief meaninglessness of life and its ability to re-create itself.”
I fed that exact prompt to Google Bard AI (which is free to use and play with if you haven’t already), and it produced this result in about one second:
I saw the flowers of my garden die, And thought: How like our lives they seem! A little while they breathe and bloom, And then they sink in earth and dream.
Yet even in their death they give A perfume sweeter than their breath; And even in their decay they leave A seed that shall bring forth new life.
So let us die, but let us leave A fragrance behind us, sweet and strong; And let us sow the seeds of life, That others may reap after us.
Pretty cool poem, but it wasn’t spontaneous thought. Knowing my prompt demystifies the process a bit.
Who is responsible for this creation? I’d say not me, and not the robot, but both of us working together, and to some extent all the works the bot was trained on or used as models. Given that these bots are taught on existing works and often blatantly plagiarize what they’ve learned from, it’s a bad idea to grant them copyright. I also don’t think I should be able to claim copyright, and I don’t think we should allow me to copyright my prompt either. Someone else could use the same prompt and get a different result, so copyrighting prompts would be a ridiculous limitation on creativity.
But in the past week, I was amused by a short story Google Bard pieced together for Mags and Patches—so amused that I took Bard’s 400-word, bare-bones plot and fleshed it out into a 4,000-word story. It was a fun experiment, and I believe the resulting story has enough of my creativity in it to be considered copyrightable. I simply used Bard as a sounding board to generate some ideas, similar to how my lucid-dreaming story The Baby and the Crystal Cube grew from discussions about Jeff Duntemann’s Dreamhealer novel in our workshop sessions but is a unique and original work.
While Morgenthau’s article points out that we don’t really understand our own human consciousness—which presents an obvious hurdle to defining the word well enough to say whether a machine has it or not—I don’t think these rather interesting machine poems are evidence of sentience. Human minds are thinking and processing information unprompted, even when we aren’t consciously aware of it, and our minds are even working when we sleep. The machines don’t dream. Their “brains” aren’t working at all until prompted or told to do something. While they can predict the likelihood of what comes next in a string of words or code, they don’t have a conceptual, abstract understanding of what words mean. And they certainly don’t compose poetry without being told to.
Finally, the comments I’ve received when posting my AI adventures on LinkedIn include statements such as “Don’t feed the beast” and “These robots are not tools for artists; they are tools for stealing from artists.” I understand the fears, and they hold a lot of validity. But I’m also interested in any events where science-fiction concepts begin to become reality. Fearing or hating technological advancements has never stopped them from happening anyway. On the other hand, as a student of public policy and intellectual property rights, I also believe in the importance of establishing legal and policy frameworks to guide the use of new technologies toward beneficial purposes rather than malignant ones. I just don’t think we can design those frameworks without developing some understanding of those technologies, and such an understanding requires experience.
So, I hope the playful spirit in which I experiment with various AI capabilities will be seen for what it is: having a bit of fun exploring something new, deepening my understanding of it, and finding opportunities for inspiration and reflection along the way.
In 2033, Meteor Mags records 88 Light Years, the second solo album featuring her vocal and piano talents. This lyric for one of her original tunes is about a legendary chess player who defeated damn near everyone in the States and Europe before quitting the game entirely at age twenty-two. At age forty-seven, he was found dead in his bathtub as the result of a stroke.
The Paul Morphy Blues
I fought fools and princes, taught them how to kneel. Vict’ry gave me nothing, nothing I could feel.
I fought states and countries, taught them how to cry. My heart is a riverbed drought has all run dry.
Conquered all horizons, I solved all the math. Quit while you’re a legend. Someone draw my bath.
Will you come and visit? Will you say my name? Hist’ry’s what you make it. Now it’s all the same.
Call me pride and sorrow. Say I was insane. I can’t see a damn thing, blinded in this game.
When there’s no tomorrow, future’s in the past, I won’t care for legends. Someone draw my bath.
The old volcano slowly releases her heat. Ponds ripple gently.
Birds flock to her warmth and nest for generations until she erupts.
Startled birds flee to nest on quieter islands, remnants of raging,
sheltering their young from the unexpected storms brought in on the waves.
The young ones will grow and raise their own to migrate, exploring the seas.
This poem was written in collaboration with SisterMoon, who also composed the original poem that appears as the epigraph to The Singing Spell in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. Although our 5-7-5 verse format is an oversimplification of traditional Japanese haiku, we did use the classical method of taking turns creating verses to form a longer poem.
Joining this collaboration as illustrator is the Midjourney AI, whose otherwordly imaginations you will now see adorning many of my original poems in the poetry archives.
Reunions and shared laughter. The band greets them all.
Then in unison: a chord. Not just any chord.
It’s a harmony of light, shining in the dark.
This poem is a variation on Japanese poetic forms that often use groupings of five and seven syllables. It is named after my favorite local band in Ann Arbor in the mid-1990s. Bassist Geoff Streadwick was previously a member of the locally legendary Morsel, created 40 oz. Sound studio to record local talent, and sadly passed away many years ago while still a young, creatively brilliant man.
You can still find Gondolier’s music online thanks to their drummer, Jayson, on his Soundcloud page. Although those recordings remain amongst my favorite things, they pale in comparison to the jaw-dropping majesty of experiencing Gondolier in concert in a friend’s basement or Ann Arbor’s Blind Pig or the bar formerly known as Ypsilanti’s Cross Street Station.
For many years, I had a Gondolier t-shirt silkscreen-printed with the first single’s cover art by the company founded by Morsel’s bassist Brian Hussey. I wore it through seven kinds of hell until the damn thing nearly fell off my body. I still miss it.
Gondolier was three young men from Michigan who made music that inspired me and continues to inspire me to this day. I had the pleasure of interviewing them once, for a music review in a local publication. But nothing has ever compared to being right against the stage when they belted out the greatest sounds I’d ever heard.
They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and perhaps that statement is never more true than in the animal kingdom. In June, I posted a pre-publication draft of a story that involved a woman and a wasp attack. A couple nights ago, my sister called and told me an equally harrowing tale about how she had recently been attacked by a swarm of bees that came out of the ground! I knew some bees lived in the ground, but not massive hives of them.
In the same story, the narrator explained some of the more gruesome aspects of octopus reproduction—aspects I was unaware of when I first started writing octo stories back in 2015 or so. It turns out that in many cases, while the octos are getting their groove on, the female decides to strangle the male to death and eat him. That’s also her last meal, because she stops eating once she lays her eggs, and she dies around the time they hatch.
After twenty years in Phoenix, I thought I had seen it all. The monsoon season that peaks around August in Phoenix had done some terrible things to me. Once, I got caught on my bike in pitch-black night in a combination dust storm and rainstorm that was like a sheet of mud pouring right out of the sky.
Another time, I was trapped on my scooter in the middle of flooded streets, and cars and busses were trying to get past me in the dark, splashing massive waves against me, and I was pretty sure I was going to die before I got back to my lightless, powerless apartment to see if my cat was okay.
I guess at some point you just accept death as an option and keep going.
Tucson’s monsoons this year started earlier than I recall those in Phoenix rolling in, but they are no less violent. Last week, I got caught walking home from the store by a dust storm that turned the entire sky brown. Two days later, I got caught walking in one of the most insane rainstorms I have seen in twenty years. The big drops of sprinkles started in, and it wasn’t even minutes until I thought I was going to be knocked off my feet by the wind and drowned in the deluge at the side of the road. Cars and busses were pulling over because drivers couldn’t even see. By the time I made it home, I was drenched from head to foot.
So, Tucson monsoons surrounded by mountains and lightning, here is a poem for you. Now please stop trying to kill me.
The Flood
Grey mountains perforated the underbelly of a great cloud that admitted no horizon, until nothing held back the rain.
City streets drowned, and vehicles lost their way, taking with them drivers, children, and families, until no one held back the rain.
The entire valley filled with rolling, churning torrents darkened by earth and history of earth, until no rim held back the rain.
No mortal knows what lies beyond, where only floodwaters venture. The deluge keeps her secrets well, and she never forgets the rain.
These seven seven-line poems go with the short story The Singing Spell. The subjects relate to the story, and the first letters of each line spell out the poem’s title. It’s not a form I usually work in, but I thought it would be fun to try something different. These poems now appear inMeteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.
PATCHES
Pressed close to the ground, a solitary huntress hungers to taste what scurries and forages unaware.
Calico colors—brown, black, and white— hide her in the sun-dappled forest floor.
Everything comes down to survival.
BILLION
Before history, I knew you like a light or a lyric or the iridescence of a hummingbird.
Only now, nothing separates us.
NEBULAE
Nurseries of infant stars, expectant giants and black holes hungering for birth, ushered into a theater of light and violent gravity where all who ever lived await eternity’s epilogue.
MINERAL
Maybe next time, I come back a stone. Nowhere to go or escape, just rock.
Alabaster. Limestone.
SERPENT
Sometimes you need to shed everything to find the right skin.
Pent-up explosions emerge as something new.
No one ever mourned the cell she escaped.
FORTUNE
Fate remains silent, only speaking in unsolved mysteries.
Road signs vanish, and travelers lose their way until that unexpected night, when everything at last makes sense.
HIGHWAY
How we got here is less important than why.
Go as far as your heart can take you, and when you reach the arid edge of time, you will find me.
It looks like several people enjoyed the previous post featuring a poem about a bird from Pablo Neruda’s book, Art of Birds. I mentioned that all but the first and last poems in the collection are about one specific species of bird, but the second-to-last poem takes a liberty with that idea. In it, having painted dozens of magically expressive verbal portraits of birds, Neruda considers himself as a bird.
MeBird (Pablo insulidae nigra)
I am the Pablo Bird, bird of a single feather, a flier in the clear shadow and obscure clarity, my wings are unseen, my ears resound when I walk among the trees or beneath the tombstones like an unlucky umbrella or a naked sword, stretched like a bow or round like a grape, I fly on and on not knowing, wounded in the dark night, who is waiting for me, who does not want my song, who desires my death, who will not know I’m arriving, who will not come to subdue me, to bleed me, to twist me, or to kiss my clothes, torn by the shrieking wind.
That’s why I come and go, fly and don’t fly but sing: I am the furious bird of the calm storm.
Last year, I got an illustrated hardcover edition of Pablo Neruda’s book, Art of Birds, translated by Jack Schmitt with drawings by Jack Unruh. It was a bit of an accident, since I thought I was ordering a bilingual edition, and I wish this volume included the original Spanish. But even without the originals, this is a very cool addition to my Neruda collection. Every poem (with the exception of the first and last) is about one specific species of bird, and many of them are right up there with Neruda’s best and more well-known poems.
The following poem is about the austral blackbird, which I had never heard of before, so here is a link to read a little more about this bird, see a picture, and listen to 30 seconds of its unique song.
Austral Blackbird (curaeus curaeus)
Whoever looks at me face-to-face I shall kill with two knives, with two furious lightning bolts: with two icy black eyes.
I was not born for captivity.
I have a wild army, a militant militia, a battalion of black bullets: no seeded field can withstand.
I fly, devour, screech, and move on, rise and fall with a thousand wings: nothing can stop my determination, the black order of my feathers.
My soul is a burned log, my plumage pure coal: my soul and suit are black: that’s why I dance in the white sky.
ideas and emotions are seeds longing to sprout unfurling green to capture the sun
they might live for centuries or be wrapped in fire presented as gifts to the blackening sky
they might become medicine or poison they might drink their fill or die of thirst they might flourish in obscurity or wither under the attention of millions
they might fill a forest like soldiers marching in chaotic ranks to the coast or stand isolated on the cliff edge where no one sleeps in their branches
seeds neither know nor care for any of this gravity tugs their roots the sun summons leaves the stalk joins earth to heaven
the seedling wants to grow yet desires nothing seeking light without ever looking
words we create together for each other lavender-scented and improvised bloom like wild roses in a field untidy and free scattered in summer sunlight delicate as lace
our blossoms want to stay unplucked from our stems we cover this field in a scent we share embracing bees who drink from us
we hold them close within our petals for moments we never recapture but always remember giving grains of pollen like gifts
paper-thin wings carry our presents to distant lovers we never meet flowers who want to taste and touch us to grow as we have grown and fill this place with creations of their own
While organizing my writing files today, I found my collection of blackout poems from a few years ago. Some were eventually combined or otherwise transformed into poems I published in Anything Sounds Like a Symphony. If you’re looking for off-beat inspiration for your own poetry adventures, give this method a shot. I didn’t invent it. It came to me through a friend of Austin Kleon, who made a name for himself doing this to pages of newspapers and launched a successful series of books including Newspaper Blackout and the New York Times Bestseller Steal Like an Artist.
I didn’t use newspapers, but a stack of National Geographic and old Playboy magazines, and odds and ends like an issue of Seattle’s Stranger.
You can do it with anything! In a writing course I took last January from Joanne Fedler, we did a similar exercise with our own material. We started with free-writing based on our recent dreams, just filling the pages with anything that came to mind, and then we highlighted only the most captivating words or short phrases. We used those as prompts for additional writing, like new starting points, but my highlighted pages resembled a blackout poem. Anyway, here’s the lot of them, from the archives.