What happens when you ask a computer to write poetry or a short story? The answer might surprise you. In 2021 we asked an artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-Neo to write poetry on various subjects. And it did — thousands of poems. Then in 2024 we asked another AI system, OpenAI, to generate short stories, and the results were fascinating. Many of the resulting poems and stories were nonsense, but hidden among the absurdity were some gems with truly unique ideas. Some of these poems and stories are beautiful, some are funny, a few are disturbing, and some are accidentally profound. Both books are available on Amazon:

• Artificial Mind: Poetry by an AI is a collection of our favorite poems written by an AI (GPT-Neo), then curated and gently edited by a human.
• Artificial Mind vol. 2: Stories and Poetry by an AI contains more poetry but mostly short stories by a different AI (OpenAI), with a bit more editing than the first volume.

The poets and authors of these books are GPT-Neo and OpenAI, as directed, curated, and edited by a human. These AI models were trained by professionals and volunteers by exposing them to enormous amounts of text found on the internet — text from blogs, forums, online magazines and books, Wikipedia, and other sources. Because the AI models are trained by digesting millions of texts from the internet, the words it generates are adapted from the thoughts, hopes, and fears of real people. AI has no conscious understanding of what it writes. But when you read these poems and stories, you may hear the dream-like echoes of society’s collective consciousness.