Last month, there was quite the commotion in Aotearoa (and beyond) over news that two books were banned from the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for their AI-generated covers<\/a>. In response, the New Zealand Book Awards Trust altered their rules to allow AI covers, but not AI-authored text<\/a>. Any book containing AI-authored text is still not allowed entry.<\/p>\n To my bewilderment, this includes my debut poetry collection, Dear Alter. Bizarre is an understatement \u2013 anyone close to me knows that I use an encrypted email client, that I\u2019ve migrated from Google Docs to an alternative with zero AI integration, that I refuse to have my photo taken by tourist companies in case it ends up on a public Facebook page that then gets scraped for training data, that I refuse to give any personal device my biometric information, and that I believe all household appliances (with one exception) should be dumb as bricks.<\/p>\n Dear Alter is not about AI, but it is, in part, about a Roomba<\/a> \u2013 as well as the connections between people, between people and machines and the celestial, language\u2019s failures, and queer possibility. The book contains three poems using lines generated by Verse by Verse<\/a>, a now-defunct experimental \u201cpre-LLM neural language model\u201d trained on the work of 22 American poets from the 1800s to the mid-20th century (as well as a larger corpus of English poetry, both found on Project Gutenberg; plus internet forum comments). These poems are part of a series called \u201ctransmissions from an empty museum\u201d: a search for language with which to convey truths, desires, experiences, and anything else that resists easy description. The speaker (who may be human or may be an android) tries on voices of poets who have gone before, like a child imitating accents, or like Goldilocks trying out chairs. Or, like a young artist.<\/p>\n In 2021, when I wrote the first version of the manuscript during Te Herenga Waka\u2019s IIML Masters programme, OpenAI had not yet released ChatGPT. Meanwhile, it was not a search for an \u201cAI writing partner\u201d that brought me to Verse by Verse. Rather, I was looking for tools I could use to remix text.<\/p>\n Remixing the words of others is a tried and true poetic practice. The cento, for example \u2013 a form popular with Modernist poets like T.S. Eliot \u2013 is comprised entirely of other texts, creating resonances, surprises, dialogue. In my \u201ctransmissions\u201d series, voices of long-dead writers echo through the empty museum, alternating with the voices of the collection itself, remixed and made strange (by inputting a previous draft of the book into Gregory Kan\u2019s leaves.glass<\/a> text manipulation tool). This is what Verse by Verse was to me: an experiment, an opportunity to fall back in love with language\u2019s delights and oddities.<\/p>\n By the time I returned to edit the book, the world had learned a great deal more about Large Language Models (LLMs) and the generative AI (tools used to generate text and\/or images, e.g. ChatGPT) built on them, with varying degrees of willingness and enthusiasm. At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult to engage in thoughtful discussion around AI use, due in no small part to the tech industry\u2019s deliberate hyping up of the term, applying it to a huge umbrella of tools and applications, depending on the exact processes being automated. Since I do not live under a rock, I considered whether it was appropriate to include those three poems. In the end, I decided to leave them in.<\/p>\n Since Verse by Verse was trained on long dead poets, my use of it was not harming a living creative (financially or otherwise), nor was I misrepresenting or demeaning their work (though it could be argued, of course, that having your work fed into a generative model is inherently demeaning). Compared to LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini (Google\u2019s rival version) which harvest from the entire internet with nary a citation, Verse by Verse\u2019s specificity (22 American poets) was one of its selling points. Upon selecting one to three poets and providing a starting line Verse by Verse suggested lines in each poet\u2019s \u2018voice\u2019 for the user to select<\/a>, which they may then arrange as they see fit. It was presented as an experiment in augmenting the creative process \u2013 as inspiration, rather than replacement. It felt only natural to include the tool, and selected poets, in Dear Alter\u2018s acknowledgements. Furthermore, with such limited scope, the environmental impact of Verse by Verse was smaller than LLMs like ChatGPT. There were no concerns around sensitive or personal data. Yet these justifications are retroactive and purely based on one poet\u2019s personal morals \u2013 not exactly a solid foundation for an organisation like the NZ Book Awards Trust.<\/p>\n In truth, the growing \u201cAI boom\u201d made me reluctant to publish this collection. I felt the constant need to clarify: my AI wasn\u2019t their AI, it\u2019s a story, a sci-fi fantasy world, a metaphor! Poets are less beholden to fact than non-fiction writers, but responsibility weighed heavy on me in my post-MA burn out. I bounced between \u201coh god people are going to think I\u2019m a tech bro\u201d and \u201cwhat does it matter? who is ever going to read this?\u201d (and the occasional fleeting post-edit \u201cI\u2019m a GENIUS\u201d). Though I know I can\u2019t control how others perceive my work, I hated that I might be misunderstood in this specific way.<\/p>\n I do not believe, for instance, that ChatGPT has a soul, or any kind of agency. I do believe, stubbornly, in the human ability to connect with just about anything \u2013 from cars to clouds to constellations. I write poetry about technology because I love the humanity of it all: the acts of creation, the slippages in understanding and communication, the constraints and mistakes, the failures of categorisation. I wrote Dear Alter because the narratives constructed by companies like OpenAI \u2013 that AI will solve every social ill, that robots will take over society, that we will transcend labour and our physical bodies \u2013 are absolutely, violently dull. Literally violent, because they obscure current real world harms enabled by generative AI (e.g. the exploitation of ghost workers in the Global South labelling hate speech<\/a>, deepfake scams (pdf)<\/a>, the toxic byproducts, labour and indigenous rights violations involved in mining raw materials (pdf)<\/a>, excessive freshwater use (pdf)<\/a> and CO2 emissions<\/a>).<\/p>\n If you are a thoughtful and patient reader, it is impossible to read Dear Alter and come away convinced the poet is a tech bro \u2013 or even that the book is about AI at all. I wrote Dear Alter because I feel a kinship with an android I met in a science and technology museum, and with my mother\u2019s Roomba, and with the industrial machine in the art installation \u201cCan\u2019t Help Myself\u201d<\/a>, programmed to endlessly squeegee up a leaking red viscous fluid. I wrote the collection because I had a knock-off Sega Toys Poo-Chi as a kid but watching Boston Dynamics\u2019s robot police dog acting cute made me want to puke. And also maybe because I\u2019m a little bitter that it\u2019s so easy for a software engineer to believe in a chatbot\u2019s autonomy and personhood<\/a> when our government just banned puberty blockers for trans kids (note: as of December 17, 2025, this ban has been delayed pending a judicial review<\/a>).<\/p>\n I do not envy the NZ Book Awards Trust for enforcing blanket rules against AI-generated content. I do, however, believe these rules have been applied hastily and inconsistently, and could be revised further. In our current AI hype hellscape, restricting \u201cAI-authored content\u201d is not a terrible idea. (If I hadn\u2019t been caught in the crossfire, I would have gone \u201chuh. good.\u201d and moved on with my day.) The Trust are setting new precedent for literary accolades \u2013 hence, perhaps, the growing pains. The Hugo Awards have been in the news for AI controversy this year, but for using ChatGPT to screen for panellists at an event<\/a> rather than anything to do with submissions or judging. The Pulitzer Prize Board requires disclosure of AI use, but only for the Journalism category. Awardees have used AI tools for classification in order to analyse large datasets<\/a> (e.g. searching through land grants written in 1800s cursive; detecting military vehicles in satellite imagery of Gaza) rather than generating images or text. Again, it pays to be specific in our language \u2013 classification vs. generation (vs. other uses like transcription\/translation and recommendation).<\/p>\n The Ockham\u2019s rules are a reflection of Aotearoa\u2019s literary communities more broadly. While not all local journals explicitly forbid AI-generated content, those that do, do so emphatically: Landfall<\/a> (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) requires checking a box to confirm submissions are original and not AI-generated, Headland<\/a> (short fiction and creative non-fiction) does not accept AI-generated material, and Takah\u0113<\/a> does not accept work \u201cgenerated or assisted by AI\u201d though this stipulation is limited to general fiction and comics submissions. Sweet Mammalian<\/a> (poetry) does not permit AI unless a poem is an \u201cexceptionally exquisite\u201d subversion of AI tools, accompanied by a clear disclosure.<\/p>\n Personally, I am more interested in the artistic reasoning behind a writer\u2019s choice to use generative AI. The Tsinghua University professor who won second prize with a novel generated in 3 hours<\/a> with student-level writing<\/a> \u2013 simply to see if he could \u2013 does not interest me. On the other hand, Rie Qudan, whose Akutagawa prize-winning novel \u201cTokyo-to Dojo-to\u201d (\u201cSympathy Tower Tokyo\u201d) contains 5% AI-generated content<\/a>, does. What she used generative AI output for was the dialogue of a character who\u2026is an AI. While I disagree with Qudan on the details (I do not believe generative AI as it currently exists can be a true writing partner or editor) I cannot help but see the creative reasoning behind this choice \u2013 that\u2019s literally how it talks!<\/p>\n And while I lack the skills to build my own language model, speculative fiction writer Ken Liu did just that<\/a>: robo_ken is a simple deep-learning neural network trained solely on his own writing. At first, Liu was disappointed; it failed to produce even GPT-3-level sentences (any single author\u2019s body of work is insufficient in volume for the purposes of training an LLM). Yet embracing its incoherence and randomness led to \u201c50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know\u201d<\/a>, an experimental sci-fi story where \u201ca machine gets to write like [Ken Liu], and [Ken Liu] gets to write like a machine\u201d.<\/p>\n Writers (and artists in general) have always had a nose for new technologies that might transform our practice in novel and unpredictable ways. Marginalised writers, especially: we are keenly aware that our humanity is conditional. Is it any surprise we tend to be more willing to experiment, given the complex, fractured lives we live? Language cannot hope to express everything, but it is still our home \u2013 as well as our playground. The delight Verse by Verse brought me could be compared to the joy of exchanging jankily autocorrected messages in high school \u2013 it was bad! It was clumsy! That\u2019s the charming part! When I tried GPT-2 out sometime in 2019, it wasn\u2019t polished like ChatGPT, but it too failed to delight me. So much of poetry is about play. What\u2019s the point if these tools aren\u2019t fun?<\/p>\n Today, in December 2025, the Google research page for Verse by Verse announces the tool\u2019s closure and suggests using an alternative poetry writing partner: Gemini. I will not be doing that. Ethics aside, Gemini does not enchant me. Perhaps this is a me problem: I am specifically interested in what happens when language stutters and fails, when these tools skip like a dirty disc and reveal that communication is kind of a house of cards and we are all solitary existences trying to reach each other\u2019s souls through imperfect means. And if the tool is boring\u2026 well, I\u2019ll just pick another one.<\/p>\nAn iRobot Roomba 780.<\/p>\n
Poet, Jiaqiao Liu.<\/p>\n