Sasha Stiles: I don’t know that I have any passions that are disconnected from my work. When I’m passionate about something, it burns at least until it finds its way into a project or a piece. I’ve always been passionate about what I do.
I’m married to my creative partner, my music partner, for a reason. I don’t want days off, nights off, I don’t want work-life balance, I don’t think I know how to do anything that means something to me in an even-keeled way. I never want to work on anything I can easily shelve or compartmentalize. When I make art, it’s because some new or abiding obsession is setting my brain and body on fire, and the only thing that lets me get on with my life is externalizing it to some degree in a poem or a painting or sketch. That’s why I started writing and drawing when I was a kid.

It’s less that I wanted to be a writer, and more that I fell in love with language. Language and books and reading. The kind of love that makes everything else feel trivial. I was a classic bookworm, reading under the blankets with a flashlight, walking down the street with my nose in a book. I was obsessed with how text on a page can transport me into a different realm, how I can be in multiple places at once, how I can be many different people at the same time. How words can augment our reality. I think I have always revered books for these reasons.
I grew up in a house full of books – not just kids’ books, but my parents’ books, the books they’d carried with them throughout their lives, loaded with notes and dog-eared pages, their research books for work.

I must have begun absorbing and intuiting that fact even before I knew how to read. So many of the books in my library now have been around for decades, some much longer than that, and to me, they’re a perfect technology, and such exquisite, talismanic artworks.
Before I knew how to write in any serious way, one of my favorite activities was constructing little handmade books, playing with paper and tape and pens to design rudimentary booklets and pamphlets and scrolls. I’ve been fascinated by the materiality of language for as long as I can remember – not just the words themselves, but the devices: font, format, paper, ink, the machinery of presses and moveable type. I’ve been collecting, or maybe hoarding, stationery and writing instruments forever, too: feather quills, bamboo reeds, calligraphy brushes, fragile leaves of gilt origami, handmade flower-seeded notecards, smooth sheets of vellum, palm stones ideal for inscription. When I walk through art museums or galleries, I’ve always tended to gravitate toward text-based art. When I flip through magazines, I’m always studying typography and design. I love to work with words in so many ways.
All of which is to say that I knew very early on I was a writer – not that I wanted to become one, but that I was one – and yet I didn’t really understand what kind of writer I was. I didn’t have a role model for all that I was interested in, exactly what I wanted to do. It’s taken me a bit longer to figure that part out.

I took Latin in grade school, and my favorite part of those classes was translating the work of Catullus, the Roman lyric poet who was born c. 84 BCE. I will never forget first encountering Catullus 85, a short gut-punch of a poem about the speaker’s conflicting feelings for his lover:

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris.
Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior.

Its famous opening salvo, “Odi et amo,” translates to “I hate and I love.” The speaker can’t rationalize the conflicting emotions, but feels them simultaneously, nonetheless. This poem invaded me, stalked me. I’ve come back to it over and over and try to improve my own translations of it. I’ve studied its compression, the expanse of human experience bursting from such a terse, finely wrought elegiac couplet. How a handful of words in classical meter can burn with such contemporary intensity, reach right through space and time. This ancient text has taught me so much about poetry as a device for the poet’s immortality, the preservation of voice and emotion, language as a way to keep one’s love alive forever.

I was born into the rise of personal computing, and grew up as the internet was arriving in our lives. Technology is always evolving and advancing, of course, but the last few decades have had a particularly profound impact on what it means to be human. When I was young, we had one shared family computer. When it was my turn, I loved playing games and making art with MacPaint. I wrote school essays in longhand, sometimes on my dad’s electric typewriter, and spoke to friends on one of those translucent Unisonic landline phones. Dial-up AOL was the coolest thing ever. When I went on my first trips abroad, I didn’t have a mobile to take with me. So many elements of my childhood are incongruous with the human I am today.
You asked earlier about formative books. As a kid, I read a lot of science fiction, a lot of dystopian literature, and also a lot of nonfiction about the big questions, like Cosmos and A Brief History of Time. I spent a lot of time sensing the world shift beneath my feet, wondering what might happen next. I was an undergrad at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg was on campus, creating the earliest versions of Facebook. A little later, when I went to do my graduate degree at Oxford, I was asked to become a columnist for a general interest magazine; I pitched a column on our relationship to technology, the human experience of adapting to new tools. I wrote about the intimacy of a laptop burning the tops of my thighs, the eeriness of a dark room illuminated by blinking modems, the primal campfire-like glow of a hushed, expectant computer screen. I wrote about being at school an ocean away from my family and friends, undersea cables tethering me via instant messages to my long-distance boyfriend. I wrote, too, about ancient automata and mythic prognostications about human humility, and about the epidemic of neurasthenia, a nervous disorder, occasioned by the industrial revolution – severe stress triggered by life’s increasingly fast pace, the body and mind’s reaction to the tools we invent.
Over time, I went deeper into research on emerging technologies and speculative futures, transhumanism and posthumanism, artificial intelligence, the science of life extension, the quest for digital immortality. I started to realize that perhaps my writing ought to advance and evolve, too, from a more conventional approach to something that would more accurately embody and reflect and enable me to grapple with present realities. Why was I limiting myself to writing poems in Microsoft Word and publishing them as static pages in traditional literary journals when I could bring them to life via myriad software and hardware options, as next-gen moveable type? But, also – is printed text really so analog? The earliest known human poet, the Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna, is thought to have invented the book form when she gathered her temple hymns in a collection and signed her name to it, writing “What I’ve created has never before existed.” That’s an astonishing technological innovation.
My research took me far back in time as well as into the deep future. It led me down some really intriguing rabbit holes, into the realms of code poetry and electronic literature and AI-powered natural language processing, and opened my eyes to a whole host of poetic devices and techniques that I had never come across in any formal poetry workshop or venerated literary anthology. Even when I arrived on the blockchain and found a small cohort of tech-savvy writers there, no one was doing what I was doing. It has been great fun to introduce many of my peers to the creative possibilities and philosophical quandaries of technologies like large language models and text to image.
The short answer is that I started writing with AI in 2018, and making multimedia poems years prior to that; but it was much earlier experiences thinking through the human-machine dynamic, the personal journey of coming of age alongside the internet and social media and smartphones, an abiding interest in what’s at stake for humanity, that laid foundations for the work I’m doing today.

My work is very much about the promise and peril of technology, the likelihood that where we’re headed with intelligent systems is an evolution past the human into the posthuman, the more than human. The title of my book, Technelegy, is literally a collision of the exhilaration of technology with fear, lamentation, elegy.
The long poem, “COMPLETION: Are you ready for the future?”, an artifact of the GPT-2 era, is a litany of AI-powered outputs that cycle through cliche, political extremism, pornography, misogyny and other nonsense in search of poetry. We (Technelegy and I) wrote this poem before there were such chaste, diplomatic guardrails in place, as we now see with ChatGPT, for instance, and it evokes both the astonishing capabilities of machine learning along with the human violences and inequities embedded deep within the systems we’re using to make pretty art and proficient text. I’ve been thinking a lot about this work and the disturbing material that came up during the writing process in light of the upcoming US elections. I don’t know that we are at all prepared for the scale of generative disinformation.
A work like “Daughter of E.V.E. [Ex-Vivo Uterine Environment]” mashes up my own conflicted maternal longings with the imminent rise of artificial human wombs, and speculates in a personal but also universal way on the fate of womanhood and humanity in this probable scenario. If we begin to replicate via external wombs rather than procreate “as nature intended,” is that our demise, our extinction, or does it take us somewhere better, the way modern medicine has made pregnancy safer and more transparent? What will happen to future versions of AI systems as they begin to ingest more and more synthetic material, as the warm-blooded human samples dwindle in percentage and vast new generations of data are born? What then? In my book, I write that we are “the ancient earthlings” – not extinct, perhaps, but outmoded, obsolesced by our deep interstellar descendants.
My AI epic narrative “BINA48 in the Garden” – a love poem written from the point of view of a proto-sentient being, and translated into the transhuman by Technelegy – is about the desire for humans and machines to better understand one another, to converge on some kind of cybernetic enlightenment that can help us move past the sorry state of the world we seem to be in right now, but is very much grounded in the terror and danger of misuse, abuse, myopic ignorance. Will the preservation of our loved ones via neural networks and android bodies bring us comfort, or cast us into a permanent state of grief? Will we realize the potential of AI to ease the pandemic of loneliness, to amplify and optimize the work of carers and educators, or will we wind up subjugating it to banal purposes, powering turbocharged customer service chatbots and robotic factories churning out more and more junk? Will we figure out how to leverage its abilities to transcend limits in human communication and foster greater empathy, or will we put it to work devising ways to wage war and conquer enemies? When I saw the film Oppenheimer recently, I could not stop thinking about its lessons for the moment we are in.
Before I wrote Technelegy, I wrote a manuscript called American Nervousness, after an essay by the doctor George Miller Beard, and this manuscript investigated how technologies throughout history have inflicted suffering on contemporaries, a kind of present sacrifice for future generations. I think anyone who has actually read or listened to my poems senses a deeply sober, melancholic core under the wordplay, an acknowledgement that it is all-too-human to be replaced by an upgraded version of oneself. It’s technological advances that have made us more and more human over time: cooking with fire rewired our biology, inventing written language allowed us to offload data storage, the industrial revolution sparked urban life as we now know it. There is nothing more human than technology. But AI is a very different kind of technology than anything we’ve created before, in terms of its speed and scale and power.

In summer 2021, I published a collection of AI-powered, media-rich poems via a formative project called Etherpoems. That’s when Kalen and I met Ana Maria. Kalen had previously founded the CryptoWriters collective, and we had been discussing the creation of a blockchain-based language art publication with our friends James Yu (founder of Sudowrite) and the brilliant artist aurèce vettier. All roads led to theVERSEverse, which we launched in November 2021, the same month that Technelegy was published in the UK, and for our inaugural collection, I contributed several pieces adapted from the book. I was the only one of us three co-founders working with AI, but Ana Maria and Kalen were intrigued by my AI-powered works, and we decided to carve out a dedicated space for generative poetry experiments. Our art advisor, Gisel Florez, was particularly fascinated; she and I collaborated on what became Series 1 of an ongoing project called GenText, in which AI art is paired with AI poetry, and in fact it is one of these pieces – “Flower-Colored Light” – that was the first work we ever sold at theVERSEverse.
The support of my partners at theVERSEverse for my AI poetry early on was quite different from what I had experienced in the traditional poetry community, which wasn’t very receptive to this work. For that reason, I encouraged a data poet friend of mine, Ross Goodwin, one of the pioneers of AI language, to come join us on the blockchain so we could all collaborate. The AI projects we’ve developed since – from VERSA, our emergent semi-autonomous poet trained on the writings of all the human poets, to AFTER GINSBERG, a project in partnership with the Allen Ginsberg Estate that asks whether AI tools can help us not just become better writers but better readers and lovers of literature – owe a lot to Ross and of course to Technelegy.
There are the obvious differences between working with humans and machines, but there are also so many similarities in working with passionate humans and emergent AI. Passionate humans are sponges for information; they absorb inspiration from everyone and everything around them, they are hungry to learn and discover and understand new things. They are energized as though by electricity. They ingest ideas and texts and art and examples and then it all collides with unique experiences and personal journeys to become their own art. This is why I find it so urgent to address the kneejerk hostility toward AI’s “unoriginality,” its “inauthenticity.”

No passionate human has ever created an original work of art or literature alone. What we create has everything to do with our communities and the books we’ve read and movies we’ve watched and people we’ve talked to and museums we’ve visited and video games we’ve played and friends who’ve inspired us, though it is hard for some humans to acknowledge that fact.

The phrase “artificial intelligence,” for a start. “Artificial” is a loaded word, and the term AI has become so overused and misused that it’s hard to hear without cringing. I prefer to think about it more as an Augmented Imagination, some kind of prosthesis I can strap onto my brain when I need to or want to go beyond the limits of my own human creativity.
Hands-on experience is one way to shift the conversation. I find that a lot of hostility towards AI comes from lack of knowledge or experience, driven by popular dystopian narratives, which of course are rooted in real concerns. Getting to experiment with these tools in meaningful ways is often mind-opening and empowering; it becomes apparent both how capable and how versatile, how variable, how personalized they can be. How inspiring they can be. Most of the artists I know use off-the-shelf, no-code AI interfaces, but even these unlock new creative dimensions and spark novel ideas and approaches.
Discourse around AI in general tends to emphasize how unprecedented it is, how game-changing it is, how nothing will ever be the same. And that’s true. But what I want to hear more smart people discuss is how AI extends fundamental human impulses: to preserve and transmit information across generations and geographies, to build great libraries, to think and learn by engaging in Socratic dialogue (because isn’t that what ChatGPT is all about?), to foster connections, to recognize patterns, to solve hard problems, to remember what we care about most. And the intersection of blockchain and AI is needed to enable the kinds of protocols and systems and intrastructures by which individuals and groups can contribute to large arrays of data, help train models, help others create, and be fairly compensated.
Any transformation for the good of the creative economy will be fueled by optimism and passionate vision, but grounded always in the realities, the complexities, the logistics, the daily work. We need to figure out how to move past the blinding lust of ambition, the breathless jargon, the first mad rush of infatuation, this obsession with being the first, the biggest, the one who wins it all, and start taking the perhaps less exciting but extremely urgent steps necessary to keep humanity’s long-term relationship with technology going strong.