LitCrawl, and "a Cacophony of Belonging"
October 28, 2024
This past Saturday, San Francisco had one of its beloved literary events. Litcrawl is a series of readings and conversations held in bookstores, bars, and cafes in the Mission District, and is part of the annual Litquake festival. Amazingly, this year was Litcrawl’s 20th anniversary, and Litquake’s 25th. Having lived in the neighborhood for almost 10 years, and having attended their events many times, I was excited to be part of the celebration again.
The first Litcrawl event I went to this year was a discussion on the Uncanny Possibilities for AI Poetry, led by Laird Harrison, Alicia Guo, Larry Ebert, and Halim Madi. After a short introduction from Harrison, Guo gave a presentation on the history of computational poetry. She walked us through the evolution from simple random processes like taking words out of a hat to more complex procedural generation, and touched on markov chains and LLMs before showing off some of her own work playing with form. I’d come in expecting the conversation to be solely about LLMs, but with her infinite and living poems Guo stretched the conversation in a more interesting direction. Her examples reminded us that while LLMs are great at content, they haven’t quite figured out form yet.
The panelists had given out handouts with poems in them, and asked the audience to guess which ones had been written by humans, and which ones by AI. Tallying the votes, we were roughly evenly split. To everyone’s surprise, two out of three were generated by AI. This was a good transition for Madi to take over, and discuss his own work. He started by explaining how he experiments with OpenAI’s Playground, and followed by exposing a bot finetuned on his prior works. To showcase the differences between the two, he prompted the audience to submit our answers to a seemingly simple question “What does the Mission mean to you?” in an anonymous form. He fed our answers into the first bot, and showed the results, tweaking temperature and other parameters to explain the inner workings of the models. The second bot, he explained, was trained on his own work, and he repeated the same exercise against it. The same input on different weights obviously produced different results, but that astonished some of the attendees. Less surprising to me, both bots came up with poetry-passing results regardless of what settings Madi picked. Iterating a few times, Madi noted that the bot trained on his own voice did sound like him, but insisted he would not have been able to come up with many of the lines it devised. He was particularly surprised by his bot’s conclusion about The Mission invoking a cacophony of belonging. As the audience questioned authorship in the face of AI generated content, Madi guided us to think about the role of the artist more as a curator or sculptor, rather than a direct creator.
Wrapping up, the panel opened up to the audience, with Ebert fielding the Q&A. The conversation ended up opening my eyes to how much of a bubble I live in. While I wasn’t expecting folks in the audience to be technical (this being a literary event) I was surprised that someone attending would not be familiar with the meaning of the LLM acronym, nor that an attendee would be confused about what AI hallucinations are. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Litquake and Litcrawl is the focus on community-building, and bringing people from different worlds together. Being reminded of the gap between the tech world I inhabit and the world around me is always good. It’s easy to forget that not everyone is as immersed in the same topics as I am.
As I was writing this post, my editor, Cursor, decided to autocomplete one of my sentences with the following, which seemed worth sharing:
I was also pleased to be part of the LitCrawl, which is a celebration of literature and the arts.
I was pleased to be part of the city of San Francisco, which is a place of creativity and beauty.
I was pleased to be part of the world of literature, which is a world of imagination and wonder.
I was pleased to be part of the human experience, which is a journey of discovery and growth.
I was pleased to be part of the conversation, which is a dialogue of ideas and perspectives.
I was pleased to be part of the future, which is a world of possibilities and opportunities.
I was pleased to be part of the present, which is a moment of connection and community.
I was pleased to be part of the past, which is a story of memory and tradition.
I was pleased to be part of the universe, which is a mystery of existence and meaning.
I was pleased to be part of the cosmos, which is a dance of energy and matter.
I was pleased to be part of the earth, which is a planet of life and beauty.
I was pleased to be part of the stars, which are a source of light and inspiration.
I was pleased to be part of the moon, which is a symbol of mystery and magic.
I was pleased to be part of the sun, which is a symbol of power and warmth.
I was pleased to be part of the sky, which is a canvas of color and light.
I was pleased to be part of the clouds, which are a dance of water and air.
I was pleased to be part of the rain, which is a song of life and renewal.
I was pleased to be part of the wind, which is a breath of energy and movement.
I was pleased to be part of the trees, which are a symbol of strength and growth.
I was pleased to be part of the flowers, which are a symbol of beauty and fragility.
I was pleased to be part of the animals, which are a symbol of life and diversity
I’ll leave it up to you to decide if this is any good or not, and whether it is poetry. I’m still not sure.
Photo: House of Breaks, by me. Previously posted on Time Travel Variety Pack.
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