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Irish Post
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Post
Can poetry by algorithm fake it?
I AM a bit freaked out by AI. I had been reading and even theorising about it in articles before I had actually tried it and discovered how unnervingly powerful it is. My first experiments with Meta AI showed it to be highly fallible. I'd tried out a few questions about myself and found that it confused me with gay rights activist John O'Doherty and former IRA man Shane Paul O'Doherty. Anyone relying on a system like that for information would go widely astray. Then just the other day, waiting for a friend, I downloaded ChatGPT to my phone and, to amuse myself, I set it a challenge. I wondered, could it write a poem, say in the style of Seamus Heaney, celebrating Hallowe'en. The moment I pressed the wee arrow sending my request the poem started to scroll down my screen. There was no measurable time taken to reflect on my request. The poem popped up immediately, like something that already existed being presented to me by a super fast search engine. Indeed even if that had been the case, the speed would have been impressive. Usually when something is created in an instant, in the time it takes to snap your fingers, we call that magic. The new faux Heaney poem was called The Howling. It contained plausible Heaney ingredients suggestive of country cottage life, like the turf smoke and the scullery table. The 'writer' of this poem knew something about Irish Hallowe'en, referencing children calling at the door as 'Banshees in bin bags'. It knew that we scooped out turnips for lanterns, not pumpkins, though it wasn't consistent in that. A pumpkin appeared towards the end. Apart from that inconsistency, is this poem good enough to get past an editor? I suspect it might be. It was presumably concocted out of scraps of other people's writings on the internet so maybe it wouldn't escape a charge of plagiarism. I then set the same challenge for Meta AI. It produced a Heaney type poem just as quickly and this one rhymed. But it's clunky. I think I would have spotted it as a fake. 'In dusk's ambiguous thicket where shadows cleave/ Hallowe'en stirs like a vernacular breath'. What do you think? I'm friendly with Frank Ormsby a poet whose work often includes haikus, little three lined poems of seventeen syllables, so I asked both Meta AI and ChatGPT to write five haikus in his style, all about County Fermanagh, where he's from, and, for fun, I asked that each poem should have an erotic element. Meta AI said, 'I can't help with that.' Chat GPT was bolder and delivered in an instant. One of its haikus is called Marble Arch Caves. Frank has indeed been writing about the caves but that work isn't published yet. It is due out next year. Here's a ChatGPT attempt at a Frank Ormsby haiku: 'Beneath dripping rock/we echo in small chambers -/your breath touches mine.' I think that's lovely. And it's exactly the requisite 17 syllables long. A computer wrote it with four others, and did it faster than I could read it. I then asked ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of Medbh McGuckian, to imagine her lamenting the death of a cat. My apologies in advance to Medbh. I don't know if she even has a cat. This is part of what it came up with: 'I do not wash the cushion./It's hollow is more eloquent than any prayer/ and smells of tea leaves,/thyme, and the page/ you once rested on/as I wrote the word/ always .' I think that is bizarre and trite but it clearly imagines how a writer might reflect on the death of a cat, the hollow on the cushion, remembering trying to write while the cat sat on the page. These are the things you would recall. There is apparent human empathy there. When I asked ChatGPT to give me a poem in the style of Paul Muldoon paying homage to Pope Leo it immediately offered me two different versions, side by side on the screen. But they were both rubbish and not at all like Muldoon. 'Not Leo the lion, though Rome still roared/ he tongued down Attila with a bishop's sword.' Of course these were rough efforts and the programme offered to tweak them further to my liking. I wonder if poets in future will be asked to prove that their work is not created in this way. Even writers who see this as cheating may be tempted to ask AI to produce a first draft of an article or poem, something they could then make their own by refining it. And editors, many of whom already take syndicated content, may be willing to use articles written by AI. Perhaps some already do without knowing it. I'm told that students are now using ChatGPT to write their essays. We are used to technology exceeding human potential. That's what it's for. But writers didn't expect computers to be able to do their writing for them. Are poets now to be as obsolete as handloom weavers? More from Malachy. . . Malachi O'Doherty's novel on the Northern Irish Troubles, Terry Brankin Has A Gun is published by Merrion Malachi's book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books See More: AI, Poetry, Seamus Heaney
The Guardian
28-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley
A Hundred Doors God! I'm lighting candles again, still The sentimental atheist, family Names a kind of prayer or poem, my muse Our Lady of a Hundred Doors. Supervised by a xenophobic Sacristan, I plant in dusty sand Names and faces that follow me As far as windows in the floor: Marble stumps aching through glass For their pagan temple, the warm Inwardness Praxiteles brought out. The intelligence of stone. The sacristan who picks my flame- Flowers and blows them out, only minutes Old, knows I am watching and he Doesn't care as he shortens my lives. Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and died on 22 January this year. This short obituary conveys something of the range of his achievements, and suggests the sociability that was an additional gift and a vital dimension of the vocation as he lived it. A Hundred Doors is the title of his 2011 collection dedicated to fellow Belfast poet, Frank Ormsby. Much of it is set in the west of Ireland townland, Carrigskeewaun, the ecological matrix of Longley's later work. In 2010, Longley estimated that a third of all his poems had been inspired by the townland and places nearby. Longley's regular stays in Carrigskeewaun were far from retreats into isolation. The poems grown there are as sociable as pastoral in spirit. Nature is cherished, but animals sighted and wildflowers identified open imaginative doors through which human individuals step, children, grandchildren, friends, always ready in the poet's mind for the conversations, or possibilities of conversation, that crystallise into poems. The title-poem of A Hundred Doors is exceptionally silent. On the Greek island of Paros, Panagia Ekatontapiliani (also known as the Church of the Hundred Doors) becomes in the poem an un-social space that encloses the speaker in his own solitude. The mood is abrasive from the start: 'God! I'm lighting candles again, still / The sentimental atheist.' The exclamation 'God!' here might be an ironical summoning of the Almighty as witness or the mild curse of everyday grumbling: either way, that 'still / The sentimental atheist' has a distancing, melancholy-humorous effect. It may even remind readers of the harsh honesty of the Welsh clergyman-poet RS Thomas: although Thomas wasn't an atheist he wrote plentifully of his relationship with God as an exchange of absences or disappointments. Longley in this Church of a Hundred Doors seeks the homing ritual of 'family names' that are themselves 'a kind of prayer or poem'. We're reminded of his particular art of poetic 'listing' – often combining mourner and celebrant. In A Hundred Doors he doesn't get far with naming names. The second stanza seems to begin with the slamming of a door as he finds himself 'Supervised / by a xenophobic sacristan'. There's no evidence in the poem that the intruder is 'xenophobic'. The term may have been comic exaggeration, but it seems in earnest, an expression of anger. At this point, A Hundred Doors resembles an eloquent contribution to that old poetic genre, the complaint. Complaints are often addressed to the person or object complained of, whether a betraying lover or an empty purse. The anger here at first is murmured by the speaker only to himself. This inoculates the tone against humour, and ensures that longing and hurt are predominant. The emotions are shared only when the poet looks through 'the windows in the floor' and sees 'marble stumps aching through glass / For their pagan temple, the warm / Inwardness Praxiteles brought out, / The intelligence of stone.' This restorative and beautifully balanced stanza refers to the remains of the Greek temple, possibly dedicated to Demeter, over which the church was built. The word 'stumps' evokes the hauntingly broken-armed statue of Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, attributed to Praxiteles and at the same time sets shivering another of those eco-connective threads in the collection, the moving handful of short war poems it contains, such as Citation, where the poet's father receives the Military Cross 'for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty'. His would be one of the names the poet wished to recall. The candles themselves become 'names and faces', following the poet as he kneels to 'the windows in the floor'. In the last stanza anger rises to the surface, and its effect is to draw the reader in as witness. Figurative power increases: the 'flame-flowers' suggest an instant of return to the townland, and a newly threatened pastoral, as the sacristan, knowing he's watched and not caring, 'blows them out, only minutes / Old'. Perhaps the sacristan symbolises Anthropocene man, maker of war on the environment, maker of wars that shatter civilian families, babies and children. The anger and even disgust at the casual inhumanity is a reminder that Longley was always a consummate poet of witness in the Belfast of the Troubles. The line-breaks are impeccable. In the penultimate line, the stress asserts plain fact: 'He knows I am watching.' The subsequent enjambment allows a heavy, angry stress to fall on the negative: 'and he / doesn't care as he shortens my lives.' It's impossible to stand outside this judgment, and not to understand it as a voiced demand on the conscience of contemporary hearers and readers. You can hear Longley read it here.
