Poetry Criticism Through the Lens of Artificial Intelligence and Its Ilk: Touted Perfection Marred by Indeterminacy

Abstract

In today’s climate of technological advances, literary criticism has been reoriented to utilize technological breakthroughs, with critics encouraged to abandon their traditional approaches to poetry analysis and instead embrace the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Mainstream literary critics concur that AI models and tools can be used to analyze literary texts, expand our ability to decipher and understand those texts, and produce fresh ideas and angles. Despite the strides made to optimize literary criticism through AI tools and their significant benefits, this paper argues that “stupid” artificial automatons are touted as perfection, but that poems’ critical analysis through the lens of AI and its ilk generates ambiguous meanings, which cannot replace human intelligence and creativity. To demonstrate those points, this study investigates the use of ChatGPT in understanding and interpreting poems and demonstrates that while AI offers numerous benefits for writers and readers, such as a valuable tool and helpful assistant for authors generating new ideas and creating literary works, mechanical/computational AI automatons cannot replace human intelligence, imagination, and creativity or provide readers with an artistic literary taste and, in this case, a conclusive interpretation of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”. On that basis, this paper contends that the unfeeling AI should not be permitted to replace human critics but should offer them assistance, with AI’s rise characterized as both a vice and a virtue, given its potential to overshadow the human imagination and dispossess poetry of its human touch and aesthetic beauty.