/ 8 April 2025

Writing with the Machine: AI and Poetic Creation

Versopolis Traineeship

by David Jhave Johnston
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Welcome to the fifth class of the Versopolis Traineeship, an initiative dedicated to expanding the horizons of poetry through interdisciplinary exploration. This session, Writing with the Machine: AI and Poetic Creation, invites participants into the evolving frontier where human creativity meets artificial intelligence, offering a hands-on exploration of how digital tools can become collaborative partners in poetic practice.

Led by David Jhave Johnston – a renowned digital poet, artist and researcher whose work spans computational creativity, multimedia art and poetic theory – this DIY tutorial-style workshop demystifies the use of AI in poetry through a practical and experimental approach. Johnston, whose projects have been featured internationally and whose poetic work with neural networks (ReRites) has redefined the terrain of algorithmic writing, brings a unique blend of philosophical insight and technical accessibility to this complex and timely field.

At the core of this session is a simple yet profound question: what happens to poetry when the poet writes with a machine? Participants will learn not only how to use AI tools – from large language models to generative text platforms – but also how to reflect critically on their impact on authorship, intention and the evolving definition of creativity.

Through live demonstrations, shared screens and guided walkthroughs, Jhave will introduce accessible AI tools and show how to integrate them into a poetic workflow. Participants will generate, edit and reframe texts, exploring prompts, constraints and serendipitous outputs to discover the aesthetic potential of collaboration with algorithms. Emphasis will be placed on iterative experimentation, encouraging poets to treat AI as a source of friction, surprise and inspiration rather than a replacement for human expression.

The workshop does not shy away from the ethical and artistic tensions that AI raises. How do we navigate questions of originality, voice and authenticity in an age where machines can simulate poetic language? How can poets preserve the personal and the political in a medium shaped by massive datasets and probabilistic logic? By engaging directly with these issues in both theory and practice, participants will come away with a richer understanding of what it means to co-create with intelligent systems.

Through interactive exercises, poets will be encouraged to build their own mini poetic experiments using AI – from generating stanzas to remixing their own work through machine interpretation. The session empowers poets to develop a DIY ethos: learning not just how to use tools, but how to bend, break and reshape them to serve their own unique artistic voice.

Join us for this exploratory dive into the future of poetic creation, where code and cadence meet, and where the boundaries of authorship dissolve into a vibrant, collaborative dance between human imagination and machine intelligence.

Disclaimer: Jhave sincerely reminds viewers that generative AI tools change so rapidly that all technical specifics mentioned in this video are subject to change. Notably: this video was recorded in late January 2025 before the release of GPT-4o had capacity to create images with remarkable text fidelity.

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