What are Poets for in the Age of ChatGPT?

Abstract

The article makes an attempt of a reflection on the meaning of the creative act (particularly, in the domain of poetry) in the age when creative goods are pro­duced by means of “generative artificial intelligence” such as ChatGPT. We ar­gue that the launch of ChatGPT and other software of the similar kind is a re­markable example, but not the beginning of the current process of the formation of the creative industries in which planning and creative activities are in a major part outsourced to the autonomous algorithm-based systems. Taking the poetic ex­perience of Pushkin and Hölderlin as a starting point, we argue that the essential qualities of poetic art include its event-like character, indeterminateness, attune­ment to the Other. Such qualities are impossible for artificial intelligence to re­produce. The creative industry, founded on the algorithmic prediction of con­sumer preferences, projects back on a person his previous experience, which is a process, fundamentally different from genuine creativity. Appealing to the ideas of “The Republic” and “Phaedrus” by Plato, we offer an understanding of true creativity as a dialogical ascent of the author and the reader from the algorithmi­cally provided comfortable consumption and commercial success to the expe­rience of beauty, which liberates from being imprisoned within one’s own pre­vious experience. From such point of view, poetic experience can be seen as a paradigmatic example of a dialogical nature of humanitarian knowledge, which does not belong to the “subject-object” study and cannot be algorith­mically modelled.