Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

The great actor James Earl Jones departed this earth. His passing reminded me of a hilarious app idea I devised at a party. I called it the God App, where the great actor would simply recite the ten commandments. When I imagined a deity speaking, I thought of James Earl Jones, the rich baritone voice that gave us Darth Vader.

My friends and I were in competition to come up with the goofiest use of this new technology. This was in the early days, when app development felt like travel into outer space; everyone schemed, had an idea that would attract some venture capitalists and rake in millions. We joked about the phenomenon.

But today we are not laughing. Instead of passages from biblical texts, language models are being fed copyrighted poems and stories. At a press conference in Hong Kong for a poetry festival seven years ago, twenty poets including myself, from multiple countries, were asked this by reporters: Could AI someday write poems as accomplished as the distinguished guests? There was immediate pushback. The poet from Portugal, I remember, spoke for everyone, saying: you need heart and blood experience to get at the truth of language.

Today’s humorous poem parodies the mining of artistic achievements, and the blurring of boundaries between artificial and human intelligence.

The Joseph Cornell App
by David Roderick

Supposedly there was this guy Cornell 
who wanted to vindicate nostalgia
as a feeling and hammered together
small boxes in which he’d place aluminum
flowers magazine clippings
and pics of girls in ballerina poses
plus odd trinkets he’d found 
on the street the wiki says he had parasitic
eyebrows and his arrangements
were like bread crumbs luring
users to a forgotten past 
of foundling chips and bottle caps
doilies pinballs bits of bits
I’ve had our coders meticulously 
upload close-ups of his art
into our servers design bots
to crack their mystery and steal
from their psychic structures
we’ll earn more clicks 
since nostalgia is like an unrepentant 
frenemy that stuns us
back to the luminous dashboard
of our past when we all had
real coins to spend in our pockets
the wiki notes that Cornell
probably had x-ray vision
and carried on conversations
with his dog he lived with his mom
which may account for the pervading
mood of stasis and dynamism
in his dioramic projects
when trying to fall asleep lately
I’ve imagined his hands hammering
gluing arranging those boxes 
in his basement he probably thought
that art rewards prolonged
attention come to think of it
it’s an ethos upon which we may 
capitalize as we find ourselves in 
this company gambling so much 
of our shared future on the past
while the present is represented
as salvaged images of birds
and broken shells and sometimes 
a few etchings of code
if we indeed hammer together 
a Cornell app as some sort 
of last recourse before human despair 
glues us to the faces of our devices
the user’s screen should feel avian
or aquatic contain a glimmer 
of our past in the glass behind.

"The Joseph Cornell App" by David Roderick. Used by permission of the poet.