Sasha Stiles — Technelegy and AI poetry

2021

Artists: Sasha Stiles · Year: 2021 · Medium: AI-collaborative poetry — texts composed jointly with GPT-family language models, released as books and NFTs · Substrate: GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models trained partially on Stiles's own writing; text generation and editorial curation; physical books and NFT distribution · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Independent; Black Spring Press Group (publisher) Sasha Stiles, an American poet of Kalmyk heritage based in New York, published Technelegy in 2021 through Eulalia Books as a book-length collection of poems that Stiles had composed in explicit collaboration with a GPT-2-derivative language model Stiles had fine-tuned on her prior writing. The collection was subsequently released as an NFT edition on Feral File in 2022, making Stiles one of the earliest published poets whose explicitly-AI-collaborative work crossed into both traditional-print and NFT-distribution markets. Stiles's specific method is careful. She treats the language model as a collaborator that has been trained on her own corpus — so its outputs have her stylistic and thematic preoccupations — and then edits, recombines, and contextualizes its outputs in the published collection. The published poems are not machine-generated; they are human-authored collaborations with a machine that has been tuned to speak in a specific register. The distinction matters to Stiles and is articulated carefully in the book's front matter. What Technelegy argues is that the emerging AI-writing practices of the early 2020s could produce genuinely human poetic artifacts if the human author takes the specifically collaborative premise seriously — that is, treats the machine not as a tool to replace her labor or as an exotic curiosity but as a substrate to write through in the same way a Shakespearean sonneteer writes through the sonnet's formal constraints. Stiles has been one of the most articulate public voices on the responsibility-framework for AI-collaborative writing. Her subsequent work has continued the Technelegy methodology and has expanded into sound-poetry and performance registers. She lives in New York and performs regularly in the contemporary-poetry scene. Lore Stiles began the Technelegy work in late 2019, when the GPT-2 model was the most sophisticated publicly-available large language model and the fine-tuning workflows Stiles used were still difficult enough that technical-programming skill was required. She developed the custom training pipeline with collaborator Kris Bones, a New York-based computational-arts technologist. The book's several years of gestation reflected the iterative nature of the Stiles-model collaboration: each fine-tuning cycle would shift the model's outputs in specific ways, and Stiles would then write new human-authored material informed by what the model was producing. The resulting collection is, in a deep sense, genuinely joint-authored. Sources • Stiles, Sasha — Technelegy (Eulalia Books, 2021). • Feral File — Technelegy NFT edition (feralfile.com, 2022). • Stiles, Sasha — sashastiles.com (artist archive).