Machines Have No Idea.

But you and I do... We have trillions of them.

All my recent talk about the rules of writing poetry and the role of the subconscious in it has been buzzing around my mind quite a lot over the last few weeks. I know that we are better at creativity than any artificial intelligence, but I really needed to get my thoughts clarified. Here’s my attempt.

Our subconscious is a knowledgeable, creative being who lives within each of us. A being who just needs some encouragement to come out. Well, perhaps not quite encouragement. In order to coax it out, you need to set up the right conditions. A shy creature, it doesn’t respond well to forcing. It is very much afraid of criticism and scorn. Freed of the threat of these, it can be very playful. It is like our inner child. All children enjoy play. All children are poets because they have no inner critic. They have not been taught too many rules and led to believe that their thoughts are childish and therefore worthless. They say what they think, making connections between objects, people and places that as adults we filter out and reject. These connections are where the feelings are, where the poetry can be found.

There are two ways of looking at the world. Two ways of explaining or communicating our experiences. The scientific way, and the artistic way. The scientific way depends on measurable facts and data. It points to objective truths, to a reality that exists separately to our human existence. Mathematical and scientific facts exist in a realm independent of us. We may have built the system, but with it we are pointing away from ourselves.

The artistic way points to experiences and uses representation, including simile and metaphor to tune into how things make us feel rather than how they can be measured.

Although artificial intelligence can be used to create things that look like art or poetry, these products are derived scientifically by comparing, categorising, blending and balancing the previous output of humans (and, increasingly, the previous output of artificial Intelligence). There is no insight or originality. Although the database that it gets its information from is as large as the entirety of the internet, it is only data. All that can be done with it is to reconfigure it and present it in different ways.

Each of us has within us a completely unique set of connections, memories and associations, forged from the unique experiences that we have had throughout our lives. We actually feel these, they make up our emotional characters. Let’s try a thought experiment. Think of someone you have known for a long time. Consider how their eye moves, the way the lid folds, how their face uniquely conveys emotion. Think of how this has changed over time as you and they have got older, got to know more about each other. Think of how different situations and circumstances at different times and places have altered these things, and your perception of them.

Now think of a blackcurrant and liquorice boiled sweet. Imagine how you might have spoken with that person whilst you were both enjoying such a sweet. Perhaps you once did. How did the flavour change the emotion? How did such things as the sound or music around you both, the smell in the air, the time of day all add to the atmosphere? Now look at how your mind can transfer these thoughts and memories to other situations. Think of how a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet or perhaps a kola cube might be experienced whilst chatting with a dentist, or with the captain of a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. You have experiences of dentists but you probably only have imagined experiences of submarine captains, based on fictional representations. No matter, I know that you can conjure up a submarine captain, who is unique to you. Your mind is brimful of images and ideas like this; boiled sweets, dentists, submarine captains, all manner of things, people and situations - Trillions of them, triggering emotions and and responses that only you can access. This is the goldmine that an artificially intelligent large language model can never get to, as there is no reason for them to come to its database in connection with other ideas. Only you have those connections, only you have the potential to bring them out and make sense of them, You are real, human, illogical and marvellous.

The human writer creates images that have a personal relevance, The human reader may connect to that relevance or find new meanings and connections within it. One might suggest that it is equally possible that the human reader can find relevance and connection in artificially produced writing? Of course connections can be drawn, or memories triggered, However, the artificial material can never be original. At best it can only be random. The responses in the human mind will always outperform the randomly generated prompts.

An artificial, random connection is not quite the same as a human one. Time for another thought experiment. I’ll do this one, but feel free to do one of your own when you get the idea. I imagine two random objects. Let’s say a watering can and a T.V listings magazine. I can put them together and weave a story from my experience. first I imagine myself the garden, pausing to see what I might watch on the television afterwards. this is the sort of connection an that an artificial intelligence might make.

But it couldn’t bring the richness that you and I can. It couldn’t see the magazine. It would be unlikely to come up with a copy of the Radio Times from 1969, like I did. I remember looking at one, stretched out on the living room floor at home. I know the texture of its pages, it was still produced on newsprint in those days, apart from a slight gloss on the cover. I am imagining reading details of an episode of something called Tales From the Watering Can to be broadcast on the radio that Thursday afternoon. (I have made that up based on things that I experienced then) The AI couldn’t develop this theme in like we can. I can almost hear that programme - even though it never existed. It is a children’s story, read in an avuncular male voice, about creatures living in and around an old watering can, perhaps with a spider’s web stretching from the handle to the spout. The AI couldn’t feel the story in the same way as those of us who have experienced such fare, stretched out on carpets (not fitted carpets mind) in the glow of the wireless. Mixed in with these memories are memories are bits of the book Charlottes Web - I saw it as a play in the theatre when my kids were little. There are also echoes of Hammy Hamsters Adventures on the Riverbank, a strange sixties television show - with a male narrator and gentle music. Perhaps an artificial intelligence could mine Charlotte’s Web and hammy Hamsster scripts, but it couldn’t get close to the feelings conjured, and wouldn not easily arrive there from the prompt “Write something about a watering can and a TV listings magazine”.

I am going to snap out of that particular reverie memory now try something else. Perhaps the radio show isn’t like that at all. Perhaps it is about a café called the Watering can. One close lose to an allotment, where old men come to drink tea and share tales of disappointments both in gardening and in life. Their browned hairy arms bear faded, indistinct tattoos from foreign ports where the ships that they sailed on once docked, allowing them just three days leave. Perhaps one of the men comes from a different background, and his arms bear not tattoos, but the ritual scarring of a different culture.

Again I can see where these thoughts might have come from. I often walk past allotments and think of the type of men who use them. Not like me, more like the generation before mine. I was brought up in Hull, and many men went to sea. One such man was my uncle Bernard who had lots of tattoos, of ships, scantily clad women, and one of the statue of liberty, which he pretended to be drawing onto his arm with a ball point pen the first time that I saw it.

I also once saw a man studying in the Hull University library. He was black and the skin of his hands, arms and face, was marked in raised bumps arranged in regular lines. Someone told me that it was ritual scarring. Like my Uncle Bernards tattoos, I thought, but not. They were stranger, more exotic, more other.

Could Artificial intelligence come up with the allotment cafe with echos of my Uncle Bernard and the ritually scarred man? Perhaps, with intensive prompting it might start to get somewhere near, but the situations would be formulaic, based on existing tales of men from allotments. They couldn’t feature the knowing, yet desperate eyes, the broken dreams, the fear and acceptance of impending death. The threads in their clothing, the wind moving the longest of one man’s eyebrow hair. It would be unlikely to try and tackle the philosophy behind their conversation. Only you and I can begin to imagine that that. Machines have no idea.