Sasha Stiles - Technelegy and AI poetry

2021

Artists: Sasha Stiles · Year: 2021 · Medium: AI-collaborative poetry, texts composed jointly with GPT-family language models, released as books and NFTs · Substrate: GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models trained partially on Stiles's own writing; text generation and editorial curation; physical books and NFT distribution · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Independent; Black Spring Press Group (publisher) Sasha Stiles, an American poet of Kalmyk heritage based in New York, published Technelegy in 2021 through Eulalia Books as a book-length collection of poems that Stiles had composed in explicit collaboration with a GPT-2-derivative language model Stiles had fine-tuned on her prior writing. The collection was subsequently released as an NFT edition on Feral File in 2022, making Stiles one of the earliest published poets whose explicitly-AI-collaborative work crossed into both traditional-print and NFT-distribution markets. Stiles's specific method is careful. She treats the language model as a collaborator that has been trained on her own corpus, so its outputs have her stylistic and thematic preoccupations, and then edits, recombines, and contextualizes its outputs in the published collection. The published poems are not machine-generated; they are human-authored collaborations with a machine that has been tuned to speak in a specific register. The distinction matters to Stiles and is articulated carefully in the book's front matter. What Technelegy argues is that the emerging AI-writing practices of the early 2020s could produce genuinely human poetic artifacts if the human author takes the specifically collaborative premise seriously, that is, treats the machine not as a tool to replace her labor or as an exotic curiosity but as a substrate to write through in the same way a Shakespearean sonneteer writes through the sonnet's formal constraints. Stiles has been one of the most articulate public voices on the responsibility-framework for AI-collaborative writing. Her subsequent work has continued the Technelegy methodology and has expanded into sound-poetry and performance registers. She lives in New York and performs regularly in the contemporary-poetry scene. Lore Stiles began the Technelegy work in late 2019, when the GPT-2 model was the most sophisticated publicly-available large language model and the fine-tuning workflows Stiles used were still difficult enough that technical-programming skill was required. She developed the custom training pipeline with collaborator Kris Bones, a New York-based computational-arts technologist. The book's several years of gestation reflected the iterative nature of the Stiles-model collaboration: each fine-tuning cycle would shift the model's outputs in specific ways, and Stiles would then write new human-authored material informed by what the model was producing. The resulting collection is, in a deep sense, genuinely joint-authored. Sources • Stiles, Sasha, Technelegy (Eulalia Books, 2021). • Feral File, Technelegy NFT edition (feralfile.com, 2022). • Stiles, Sasha, sashastiles.com (artist archive).