⁺‧₊✧ Two AI Poems ✧˖°⊹

ALL SECRET ENDINGS // $TARDEW_VA::EY_GUN_MOD.EXE

I was inspired to use AI in the two poems presented here by a call for submissions by the AI Literary Review.

Whilst the first poem presented here, titled, ALL SECRET ENDINGS, was accepted for the inaugural issue of the AI Literary Review, the second poem, titled, $TARDEW_VA::EY_GUN_MOD.EXE was rejected for the second issue on the basis that it was, according to the editor, stretching the definition of a poem a little too much. I was okay with this, and mention it here only to differentiate between one poem that was published at the AI Literary Review, and one poem that wasn’t. What’s also important to mention is how I saw the first two submission periods for the AI Literary Review as an opportunity to write poems — using AI — that existed somewhere in the interstice of visual art and poetry.

Sometime after producing these two poems — alongside the webcomics that feature on this substack — my phone broke in an ASDA cafe when it rained one time and I haven’t downloaded StarryAI since. This tells me that I’m probably bored with using AI in my work already, which doesn’t surprised me in the slightest since using AI stuff still feels like a novelty rather than a really decent creative tool for me to use. At the same time, saying I’m bored with using AI in this way is sort of ironic since I would probably enjoy creating a collection of poems that looked like this if there was a publisher willing to commission that kind of thing (doubt).

I have also thought at length about writing a manga using this kind of generative AI if I had the time and inclination to do so; even though I suspect the idea of using AI images to produce a manga — or something that lies creatively adjacent to a manga — remains heretical to some people out there who are completely against AI art projects. I understand why artists like Hayao Miyazaki consider using AI heretical but the fact that AI is considered heretical actually makes me want to use it even more — and is likely the driving factor in having used AI in the two poems presented below.

I feel like using AI is a good way to annoy people and anyone who has done their reading knows from a Deleuzian standpoint, at least, philosophy should exist to annoy. Likewise, it is no secret that annoying people has always been my intention as a writer. I also think it’s useful as a writer to have gone and seen what all the fuss is about regarding ChatGPT only to come away from it feeling confident that the writing ChatGPT is capable of producing — whilst having some very serious and useful applications — is not actually very good when it comes to producing something creative, including, but not limited to, writing/poetry that resonates on a human level. I have yet to read something written by an AI that has made me cry, for example, and it is easy enough to point out that a considerable level of human agency is still required when it comes to shifting through the mountains of shit AI is actually capable of producing. I suspect the real-world application of all writing produced by ChatGPT since its inception lies at less than 0.0000001%. More than happy to be persuaded against thinking this.

ALL SECRET ENDINGS: Visual elements were prompted on StarryAI, and edited on ColorSync Utility. A collage of this image and the text, prompted through ChatGPT, was arranged on Pages, with smudging later applied using PixelStyle Photo Editor. As previously mentioned, it was first published at the AI Literary Review.

Believe it or not, the album artwork featured in the Sewerslvt discography was my biggest inspiration for this poem. Many of the accompanying artworks and ‘visualizers’ that accompany Sewerslvt’s music are layered with the same aesthetic of digital anxiety and paranoia that I find projected onto the world of artificial intelligence; and it might be for this reason that I’ve always found this digitally-positioned melancholic sound — and the mood it produces — to be a sufficient prognostication for an age of the (hyper)eschatological condition. I think my two AI poems are about that too.

I’ve only written about Sewerslvt in passing, having previously written about Sewerslvt and Sadfem’s remix of American Football. I also wrote about Sewerslvt a few years back when someone messaged me to say I shouldn’t be listening to music that was “problematic”. Being told not to use AI in my writing alongside being told not to listen to Sewerslvt sort of made me think AI/Sewerslvt belonged together somehow. Either way, here’s what I wrote and published as a result of being told what I should and shouldn’t listen to:

‘There are some people who like Yukio Mishima before them are concerned only with what that dark genius once described as an obsession with ‘night and blood and death’, and to quote his ‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’, a ‘nihilism that belonged to youth.’ I accept that most listeners are never going to accept Sewerslvt on these literary terms since it is far easier to condemn a person than it is to express any degree of sympathy. And so, a quick succession of Bataillean eyes transition to the endless liminality of backroom doorways in an accompanying audio-visual made for people who might one day understand it. In the end, what most people want in life is an easier route from their misery. The tragedy is that there is none.’

This was written in reference to the final Sewerslvt project, we had good times together, don't forget that. The story that circulates around Sewerslvt, in relation to this album, especially, is an immensely sad one; and it is nice to see them producing new music under the name, Cynthoni, whose SMOKE IT TO THE BUTT I enjoyed listening to last year. As a side note to this then, I don’t believe we should ostracise people; and I think we’d do better as a culture and society to better understand the dark wells of poor mental health that go far deeper than the ‘feeling a bit down’ that so much of the neoliberal dispositif of ‘awareness’ likes us to believe. That’s not to dismiss the seriousness of depression but it is a call to understand that mental illness can manifest in ways that lie outside of our popular conceptions of what mental illness is, and what it should look like.

$TARDEW_VA::EY_GUN_MOD.EXE: Visual elements were prompted on StarryAI, and edited on ColorSync Utility to produce an accelerationist intensification of contradiction meets an AI-generated 420blazeit MLG gamer sort-of-deep-fried pastiche of Chao Mei’s September in the North. This is a poem the AI Literary Review rejected — for good reason probably — and yet I think it’s nice to publish it here in reference to the other AI poem I made since it is a poem that delves deeper into an accelerationism that whilst currently lacking a unified aesthetic feels like it might one day hyperstitionalize one into existence.

I’ve always found it profoundly oxymoronic that the trad wife movement promoted itself through video hosting formats that seemed antithetical to the values of the movement itself, and so their aesthetic recalled then, not only the Baudrillardian fatal strategy par excellence, but a kind of accelerationist tendency that was initially about riding the intensities of contradiction that existed in the culture.

The deliberately satirical nature of the poem inadvertently captures the pseudo-revolutionary acc/rhetoric of something like MAGA Communism. I’d also like to add that this poem was inspired by a conversation I overheard where someone said Stardew Valley — a perfect game — would be made better if it included guns. Personally, I think this poem would look great printed onto a large, imposing canvas and displayed in the Tate. Hmu if you can make it happen.

---

---

⁺‧₊✧ GHOST LIVES : CURSED EDITION is now available in all good bookshops or can be purchased direct from the award-winning, Bad Betty Press ✧˖°

“In Alex Mazey’s singular fusion of visual and Cute poetics, join Ghost as they pass through the liminal spaces of empty car parks, hotel corridors and lighthouses – searching for, but never quite finding, connection. Part poetry collection, part minimalist comic, in which our reality shifts from the political to the virtual, from FBI raids to survival horror-style locales – in which we are both the possessor and the possessed. Ghost reassures us that it’s heartbreaking to be human, and society is set up to fuel that loneliness. But, there is light within the gloom of capitalism’s ennui. Most notably the glow of vending machines at night – or is that the afterlife?” - Matthew Haigh

“Alex Mazey’s playful text art sequence follows Ghost through a hyperreal metropolis beset with neoliberal temptation and eschatological peril. Woven between the visuals are virtuosic lyric poems: poignant, philosophical and irreverent. Mazey gamifies this astute, genre-defying collection with an intricate plexus of symbolism, mysticism, numerology, reference and ritual. Haunting and haunted, Ghost Lives paints an eerily recognisable picture of how it feels to be lonely, or, in other words, to be human.”