So I agree that the title is a little clickbaity. But here is a very small note on my current state of mind on public poetry. By public poetry I mean the ones we read on Instagram, and the internet and bookshops and the ones we are subject to on terrible open mic poetry circuit. In the era of ChatGPT, LLMs (Large Language Models), and the ongoing AI revolution it is needless to say that it would be hard to predict human written poetry from computer generated ones.
Perhaps because I work in AI and it is my profession to think about AI for the better part of the day, I have a hard time believing that large swaths of internet poetry (and prose) will more or less be generated by LLMs in a few years. I even worry that large swaths of internet poetry even today are generated by LLMs.
Standing in the midst of the AI revolution (which I support for various reasons), I have begun losing taste in the consumption of publicly published poetry. I prefer my poems to be written by humans and born in the mind of an intensely sensitive human being. I prefer poetry that bears the weight of human suffering or celebration and not generated via machines merely predicting the next token.
I have been at best a mediocre poet for the last 15 years but I will continue believing what I believed for decades. Poetry is an intensely private experience. Publishing and sharing of poetry makes almost no sense.
Poetry is like a kiss. Yes, some people might enjoy performing the act in public but it does not change the fact that it originates and ends between two human beings. And most of it happens in private and without the scandalous eyes of the public.
I prefer my poems to be read by one person, for whom it is meant. And in some cases, a small audience. Beware if you have started liking words generated by a masked shoggoth and started calling it poetry.
(My views can change entirely in the coming days and years.)