Conflicted Copy

Sam Riviere is a past master of taking and exploiting ‘found’ content and process and transforming it into poetry that captivates and unsettles. Here, he harnesses anxiety about AI only to exploit it for his own extraordinary ends. In this case, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), an open source neural network , is used to produce poems that, stripped of the usual authorial clutter, find themselves nonetheless cohering around a voice that speaks of the uncertainties, fears and desires of a world that is desperately, poignantly and recognisably human.

''Riviere’s machine language, often delightfully clunky, also has its magical aspects, unplugging and rebooting our perceptual apparatus as we look over the shoulder of machines clumsily figuring us out. . . In turning poetry towards machine language, Riviere quietly kicks off a poetic revolution for our time.'' Guardian