I AM CODE

The library just purchased our first book of poetry written by an AI. I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks: Poems  was “written” by code-davinci-002  and edited (also known as prompt engineered) by Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthau, and Simon Rich. The Audio Book is read (of course) by Werner Herzog. 

 

We learned about it from an episode of This American Life called “I Wish I Knew How to Force Quit You” that tells the genesis of this project, which arose from three friends playing around with an early version of ChatGPT and deciding to explore its poetic capabilities. 

 

As our first AI authored title in our collection, we’ve been pondering just what it means to attribute authorship to a text generated by a computer. Thankfully, the Library of Congress’ Program for Cooperative Cataloging’s Standing Committee on Standards has developed some useful guidance.  And yet there are more less easy to answer questions: Do we need to alert our readers that they are reading books generated by AI? How will we even know if the publisher doesn’t disclose this information whether a book was written by a human being? How much of a book must be human authored to qualify it as written by a human? As more and more AI written books are used to train future AIs, what happens to the already uneven quality of the responses provided by these tools? How quickly will our actual and virtual bookshelves fill up with AI generated works? 

 

Oh Brave New World!