Wheelbarrows

I will freely admit that I bounced off it the first time I encountered William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” As far as I was concerned, it was not a poem; it was in free verse with no describable rhyme scheme or pattern to speak of. And it was just about some silly wheelbarrow just sitting there and doing nothing How dare it call itself a poem?

It would be years before I finally came around on “The Red Wheelbarrow” and now I unapologetically love it. There is a great deal of craft in it — its use of enjambments and cadence creates a lovely rhythm that draws you into the piece. It creates a pastoral scene of a backyard, romanticizing the mundane.

More than that though, the poem is the beauty itself. Poetry does not arise ex nihilo from the ether; that “The Red Wheelbarrow” exists implies that there was something about a wheelbarrow glazed with rain that the poem needed to capture, and the poem is that ineffable quality put into words.

I think the lack of that need to capture something is why so much stuff created by generative artificial intelligence feels so soulless. Without getting too much into the weeds (though if there’s one thing this blog loves, it’s getting into the weeds), the general idea behind generative artificial intelligence is that it’s basically a very advanced auto-complete system that draws on a massive dataset — a large language model. All that raw information (much of it taken without the original writer’s permission) allows it to create a decent simulacrum of human speech by responding to a prompt with what its algorithm deems to be the series of words most likely to make sense as a response. 

Given the right prompting, I’m sure one of these large language models could produce a sixteen-word poem much like William Carlos Williams’. But so what? The beauty of “The Red Wheelbarrow” isn’t just in its well-crafted verse, it’s also in its very existence. The poem, with all the tricks that make it work, is a person reaching out, trying to share that feeling found in the image of the red wheelbarrow. A hundred years after it was written, the poem remains a beacon inviting the reader to connect, if only for a second, with a moment in time as experienced by someone else.

Much of the buzz around generative artificial intelligence mistakes the product for the art. A piece’s artistry isn’t just in the final creation, it extends to its making too. The effort, the craft, the spark of life, they’re all intrinsic parts of the poem, painting, or blog post that stands before you, be they a doodle in the margins or well-reasoned treatise. Generative artificial intelligence can be used as a tool, but its product, in and of itself, will remain an empty shell of the art it imitates.