Pre-existing forms
Turns out I kinda misunderstood how Beeminder's rate modification works, so I'm still on the hook for one more weekly post before I can shift my posting rate down to once every two weeks. Still, here's an off the cuff mini post to keep the system satisfied.
While browsing around for AI predictions a little while ago I stumbled upon this post on Rodney Brooks' blog talking about a rather prescient poem from 1961 by the poet Adrienne Rich. The whole poem is worth reading, but the most striking part is its last stanza, managing to sum up my thoughts on AI creativity right now in 2026:
Still, when they make you write your poems, later on, who’d envy you, force-fed on all those variorum editions of our primitive endeavors, those frozen pemmican language-rations they’ll cram you with? denied our luxury of nausea, you forget nothing, have no dreams.
LLMs can be uncannily good at capturing certain styles and registers of writing (among many other things!), but there's always a painful predictability to what it puts out that makes it obvious when it's just a vibe regurgitating machine. This also reminds me of another quote from an essay by another poet, Frank Bidart.
"We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."
LLMs can fill pre-existing forms just fine, but can they be changed by them?