Wislawa Szymborska, at her home in Kraków in 2000. Witold Krassowski (EL PAÍS)
Artificial intelligence (AI) fascinates our world. We have a thousand unanswered questions about them. The unknown, how far it can go, instills fear in us. Will he succeed in scratching even poetry, the last sacred refuge of wisdom?
I re-read the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, her terrifying metaphors, her linguistic creativity, her poetic shocks, her statement: “Inspiration, whatever its true origin, arises from an eternal ‘ No ER’.” And I’m relieved to wonder if the AI will be able to create such an abyss of beauty.
Poetry, the only one capable, as Brazilian poet Roseana Murray writes, of “planting trees and shadows” or elevating the reality of a banal onion to the stars, will never be able to reveal the impenetrable mystery to imitate poetic creativity.
Yes, only a human mind will be able to extract such sublime flashes of creativity from a simple onion as Szymborska managed to:
“Another thing is the onion.
has no inwardness
it is itself, the onion.
A consistent onion,
successful creation.
When a pitch is thrown away,
the minor in the major is included
and in the next the following.
A centripetal leak
an echo that develops in the chorus”.
If the AI thinks it can do anything until it creates metaphors and hidden meanings, it’s wrong. “Everything” is a sacred, impossible word. Maybe it’s just the poetry. The Polish poet writes:
“Everything, impudent word and full of presumption. It should be written between crosses. It pretends that it omits nothing, that it adds, that it encompasses, contains and has, and yet it is only a storm rag.”
Artificial intelligence and its priests have not yet understood that inspiration, whatever its origin, comes from an eternal “I don’t know”. And it so happens that the phrase “I don’t know” is small, but it flies on mighty wings.
Citing Preacher’s “nothing new under the sun,” Szymborska writes that in the language of poetry, “nothing is ever ordinary, neither day nor night, and especially no tiny existence in this world.”
And remember prophetically that the apple would not have fallen at his feet if Newton had not said, “I don’t know.”
Maybe it’s just a dream of mine, but I prefer to think that the AI that creates so much fear will never be able to invent an original image. You will not create real poetry, you will only be able to copy it.
A colleague from that newspaper, who has great literary flair, writes to me after spending a week’s vacation with his family that he “felt loved” and that “that’s what counts in the end.” I replied that he feel loved because wanting is not just love.
He replied: “Tell me more, I’m interested.” How would the vaunted artificial intelligence have reacted?
Yes, I prefer to believe that AI, powerful and intimidating as it is, will never be able to transcend the abyss of human creativity or write a sublime poem about a simple and humble onion with such wisdom.