A dialogue between an opponent of artificial intelligence and the ghost of Walt Whitman

Characters

THE OBJECTOR: A passionate opponent of generative AI, convinced that machines are destroying human creativity.

WALT WHITMAN: American poet, deceased but insufficiently silent.

Evening. A man sits before a computer screen. On it is a website filled with poems, portraits, maps, games and musical recordings. Music begins: an old poem carried by an unfamiliar voice over a strange, beautiful arrangement.

THE OBJECTOR:
Turn it off.

WHITMAN:
Why?

THE OBJECTOR:
Because it is false.

WHITMAN:
The poem?

THE OBJECTOR:
The music. The voice. All of it. A machine made it.

WHITMAN:
Yet you recognised beauty in it quickly enough to resent it.

THE OBJECTOR:
Who said that?

WHITMAN:
I did.

THE OBJECTOR:
Who are you?

WHITMAN:
Walt Whitman. Printer, teacher, journalist, nurse, loafer, celebrant of bodies, ferries, leaves, labourers and the democratic soul.

THE OBJECTOR:
You are dead.

WHITMAN:
A temporary inconvenience. Poets become accustomed to it.

THE OBJECTOR:
Then you should understand. This machine is feeding on the work of the dead.

WHITMAN:
The dead have always fed the living.

THE OBJECTOR:
Not like this.

WHITMAN:
No age feeds upon the past in precisely the same manner. The monk copied with his quill. The printer locked letters into iron. The photographer trapped the face in silver. The phonograph caught the human voice and made the dead speak from a revolving cylinder. Each contrivance appeared unnatural until it became ordinary.

THE OBJECTOR:
Those machines reproduced human work. Artificial intelligence imitates it.

WHITMAN:
And what is a poet's education but a long season of imitation? We borrow rhythms before discovering our own. We inherit forms, metaphors, myths and words worn smooth by generations of mouths.

THE OBJECTOR:
A poet understands what he borrows.

WHITMAN:
Sometimes.

THE OBJECTOR:
A poet feels.

WHITMAN:
Often.

THE OBJECTOR:
A machine feels nothing.

WHITMAN:
Agreed.

THE OBJECTOR:
Then it cannot make art.

WHITMAN:
A printing press feels nothing. A violin feels nothing. A camera feels nothing. The keys beneath your fingers feel nothing. Must every instrument suffer before it may participate in creation?

THE OBJECTOR:
Those are tools. They do what the artist tells them.

WHITMAN:
And this machine sprang from the earth and began publishing poems of its own accord?

THE OBJECTOR:
You know what I mean. It makes too much of the work. The human merely types a few words and accepts the result.

WHITMAN:
Is that what happened here?

THE OBJECTOR:
The music was generated.

WHITMAN:
That was not my question.

THE OBJECTOR:
What difference does it make?

WHITMAN:
All the difference. Who found the poem? Who read it? Who examined its rhythm and meaning? Who imagined what kind of music might carry it? Who rejected the unsuitable versions? Who listened again and again? Who selected the final interpretation? Who prepared the text, built the page, added the history and placed it before the public?

THE OBJECTOR:
A man, perhaps. Assisted by machines.

WHITMAN:
Then describe the whole act, not merely the part that offends you.

THE OBJECTOR:
You are avoiding the central problem. Generative AI is replacing musicians, illustrators, writers and programmers.

WHITMAN:
Who would have been employed to make this particular collection without it?

THE OBJECTOR:
Human musicians ought to have been employed.

WHITMAN:
By whom?

THE OBJECTOR:
By the person running the site.

WHITMAN:
With what treasury? Shall a retired schoolteacher commission an orchestra for every forgotten lyric he discovers? Hire singers, engineers, arrangers, painters, historians and programmers? Maintain a studio and pay a company of scholars?

THE OBJECTOR:
Then he should make fewer things.

WHITMAN:
Ah.

THE OBJECTOR:
Quality matters more than quantity.

WHITMAN:
It does. But that is not quite what you said.

THE OBJECTOR:
What did I say?

WHITMAN:
You said that only those with sufficient money, time or institutional support should attempt work of this scale.

THE OBJECTOR:
I said no such thing.

WHITMAN:
You implied it. Before this technology, a project such as this required wealth, patronage or an organisation. You would preserve human employment by reserving ambitious creation for those able to purchase human labour.

THE OBJECTOR:
That is unfair.

WHITMAN:
Is it? The alternative here was probably not a thousand paid musicians. It was that most of these musical settings would never exist.

THE OBJECTOR:
Perhaps silence would be more honest.

WHITMAN:
Silence has never lacked defenders.

THE OBJECTOR:
You speak as though every generated song were a triumph.

WHITMAN:
Certainly not. Abundance produces rubbish as energetically as it produces revelation. That was true before electricity. I have attended human concerts.

THE OBJECTOR:
Then you admit that AI fills the world with mediocrity.

WHITMAN:
Humanity had filled it rather thoroughly already.

THE OBJECTOR:
You make a joke of everything.

WHITMAN:
No. I refuse to blame a new instrument for an ancient human weakness. Ease can encourage laziness. Speed can discourage reflection. Novelty can masquerade as talent. A creator who publishes everything merely because it can be generated has surrendered judgement.

THE OBJECTOR:
At last, we agree.

WHITMAN:
We agree that judgement matters. Look again at the site. There are several interpretations of some poems. Why?

THE OBJECTOR:
Because the machine can make endless variations.

WHITMAN:
Because a poem does not possess only one possible sound. One interpretation discovers grief. Another discovers anger. Another hears irony beneath the sorrow. The machine presents possibilities; the human chooses which possibilities deserve an audience.

THE OBJECTOR:
But none of those performances is real.

WHITMAN:
You heard one. It entered your ear. It altered the room. Your breathing changed.

THE OBJECTOR:
That does not make the singer human.

WHITMAN:
No. Nor need anyone pretend otherwise. Honesty is essential. Let the listener know that the performance is machine-assisted. Let no synthetic singer claim a human biography. Let no creator hide the means by which the work was made.

THE OBJECTOR:
A label does not solve the ethical questions.

WHITMAN:
No label has ever solved an ethical question. It merely permits the question to be asked honestly.

THE OBJECTOR:
And what of the artists whose work helped train these systems without permission?

WHITMAN:
That is a serious charge and should receive a serious answer, not a theatrical one from a ghost. Laws, licences, compensation and consent must be debated among the living. Those who build powerful systems must be held accountable for how they obtain and use human labour.

THE OBJECTOR:
So you concede that the technology may be founded upon exploitation.

WHITMAN:
I concede that no technology is purified merely because it is new. But neither is every use of a technology identical to its worst use. Oppose exploitation precisely. Demand transparency precisely. Protect living artists precisely. A hammer may build a school or break a skull; wisdom lies in distinguishing construction from assault.

THE OBJECTOR:
Convenient. The familiar claim that technology is neutral.

WHITMAN:
I did not call it neutral. Tools shape the hands that hold them. The printing press altered thought. The railway altered distance. The camera altered memory. This machine will alter creativity, employment, language and perhaps our understanding of originality. That is why it requires responsibility, not superstition.

THE OBJECTOR:
And what responsibility does this website fulfil?

WHITMAN:
It preserves the words. It names the poets. It gives their dates, their lives and their histories. It invites readers to examine the original text rather than replacing it. It offers music as an interpretation, not as a correction. It gives away what it creates rather than locking it behind a tollgate.

THE OBJECTOR:
You make it sound charitable.

WHITMAN:
Is it not?

THE OBJECTOR:
Perhaps. But poetry does not need music to justify itself.

WHITMAN:
Certainly not. Nor does a mountain need a path. The path is for the traveller.

THE OBJECTOR:
Some travellers should learn to climb.

WHITMAN:
Some will never approach the mountain unless a path first invites them.

THE OBJECTOR:
People should read poems properly.

WHITMAN:
Properly?

THE OBJECTOR:
Slowly. Attentively. On the page.

WHITMAN:
Poetry lived in the mouth long before it lived on paper. It was sung, chanted, prayed, shouted, whispered and remembered. The silent printed page is not poetry's natural state but one of its many habitations.

THE OBJECTOR:
Generated music may distort the poem.

WHITMAN:
Every reading distorts it. Every voice chooses an emphasis. Every critic opens one door and leaves another closed. Interpretation is not the absence of distortion; it is distortion made thoughtful.

THE OBJECTOR:
And when it is not thoughtful?

WHITMAN:
Reject it.

THE OBJECTOR:
That is your entire defence? Generate freely and discard the failures?

WHITMAN:
Is that not how notebooks have always worked?

THE OBJECTOR:
A notebook does not consume enormous quantities of other people's art.

WHITMAN:
Again, hold the builders accountable. Improve the systems. Establish fair rules. But do not confuse reform with prohibition merely because disgust is easier than discrimination.

THE OBJECTOR:
You seem remarkably enthusiastic about machines for a nineteenth-century poet.

WHITMAN:
I sang steamships, engines, workshops, telegraphs and the clamour of Manhattan. I saw no wall between the body and the age in which the body lived. Had I feared every new means of carrying the voice, I should have whispered my poems into a field and forbidden the grass to repeat them.

THE OBJECTOR:
Would you truly be pleased to find your poems here, sung by voices that never breathed?

WHITMAN:
I would listen critically.

THE OBJECTOR:
That is not an answer.

WHITMAN:
I would dislike some. I would laugh at others. One might discover a pulse I had not consciously heard when I wrote the lines. Another might bury them beneath grandiose noise. I would argue with the arrangements as I argued with editors, compositors and myself.

THE OBJECTOR:
But would you permit it?

WHITMAN:
My work has passed beyond my permission. That is part of being dead.

THE OBJECTOR:
That sounds rather bleak.

WHITMAN:
It is liberation. A poem that survives its poet belongs to encounters the poet cannot supervise. A schoolchild recites it badly. An actor declaims it magnificently. A grieving woman remembers half a line incorrectly and is comforted by it. A composer gives it strings. A retired teacher gives it a synthetic choir. The poem continues its journey.

THE OBJECTOR:
And the poet has no say.

WHITMAN:
The poet had his say. It is called the poem.

THE OBJECTOR:
Suppose someone who has never willingly read poetry hears one of these songs.

WHITMAN:
Go on.

THE OBJECTOR:
Suppose the music catches their attention. They look at the words. They learn the poet's name. Perhaps they read another poem.

WHITMAN:
A dreadful outcome.

THE OBJECTOR:
Do not mock me.

WHITMAN:
I am waiting for the injury.

THE OBJECTOR:
The injury is to human art, to the value of learning an instrument, training the voice, mastering composition.

WHITMAN:
Those things retain their value. The existence of photography did not make the human hand worthless. Recorded music did not abolish the concert. Cinema did not extinguish the theatre. New forms disturb old arrangements, sometimes cruelly, and society must protect those harmed by the disturbance. But art is not a fixed quantity that must be divided among competing makers.

THE OBJECTOR:
The machine can produce more songs in a day than a musician can write in a year.

WHITMAN:
And a camera can produce more portraits in an hour than a painter can complete in a lifetime. Yet we still stand before paintings.

THE OBJECTOR:
Because a painting contains the touch of a human being.

WHITMAN:
Then treasure it. Pay the painter. Visit the gallery. Teach children to draw. Nothing on this screen prevents you.

THE OBJECTOR:
It competes for attention.

WHITMAN:
Everything competes for attention. Your task is not to eliminate abundance but to cultivate discernment.

THE OBJECTOR:
You make the critic responsible for the flood.

WHITMAN:
I make everyone responsible: the companies that build the systems, the legislators who govern them, the artists who use them and the audiences who decide what to reward.

THE OBJECTOR:
And the machine?

WHITMAN:
Responsibility belongs to beings capable of answering.

The music on the computer has ended. Neither speaks for a moment.

WHITMAN:
What poem was it?

THE OBJECTOR:
I do not know.

WHITMAN:
Look.

THE OBJECTOR:
It is by someone I have never heard of.

WHITMAN:
Read it without the music.

THE OBJECTOR:
Why?

WHITMAN:
To see whether the machine concealed the poem or introduced you to it.

The Objector reads. At first silently, then aloud.

THE OBJECTOR:
It is better without the music.

WHITMAN:
Perhaps.

THE OBJECTOR:
You agree?

WHITMAN:
The music has already accomplished something.

THE OBJECTOR:
What?

WHITMAN:
You are reading the poem.

THE OBJECTOR:
That does not make me a convert.

WHITMAN:
I asked for no conversion.

THE OBJECTOR:
I still believe AI cannot feel beauty.

WHITMAN:
Neither can ink.

THE OBJECTOR:
I still believe it can be used to exploit artists.

WHITMAN:
Then defend them.

THE OBJECTOR:
I still believe much of what it creates is empty.

WHITMAN:
Then leave the empty things behind.

THE OBJECTOR:
And this?

WHITMAN:
You tell me.

The Objector looks again at the unfamiliar poet's name.

THE OBJECTOR:
I heard the poem.

WHITMAN:
Yes.

THE OBJECTOR:
Not the machine.

WHITMAN:
Exactly.

THE OBJECTOR:
Then what did the machine contribute?

WHITMAN:
A bridge.

THE OBJECTOR:
A bridge is not a destination.

WHITMAN:
No. But without it, many never cross the river.

Whitman begins to fade.

THE OBJECTOR:
Wait. Is the music art?

WHITMAN:
Ask a better question.

THE OBJECTOR:
Which is?

WHITMAN:
What has been carried from one human being to another, and was the carrying done honestly, thoughtfully and with care?

THE OBJECTOR:
The machine still has no soul.

WHITMAN:
No.

THE OBJECTOR:
Then where is the soul in all this?

WHITMAN:
In the poet who wrote. In the person who chose. In the listener who stopped. In the old words entering a new life.

Whitman disappears. The Objector reaches towards the computer.

He does not turn the music off.

He presses replay.