When I was at Oxford studying modern and postmodern literature, I did my dissertation on the Sirens section of Ulysses, drawn in as so many students before me by the allure of its risky polyphony. “People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be,” writes James Joyce in his transposition of Homer’s Odyssey into a different key, echoing fellow Irishman George William Russell. When Joyce plays language, it is undeniably seductive; words beckon and betray, stirring desire only to delay or defy expectation, to confound definition. How exhilarating it was (and still is) to sail through the choppy waters of Joyce’s musical prose with its sparkling wave breaks and impenetrable, inky depths, even if the experience sometimes left me feeling as though I’d been dashed to bits on jagged rocks.

Today, from the vantage point of a poet and artist intimately engaged with AI-generated text, my intoxication makes all the sense in the world. Just as Joyce wove disparate voices, rhythms, symbols into enigmatic palimpsests, models powered by artificial intelligence are great seas of narrative and other data, a vast collective activated by tidal wisdom: the eternal beating rhythm of zero and one, above and below, night and day, old and new. In both cases, language promises discovery, coaxing us into a labyrinth of meaning where boundaries between reality and imagination, known and unknowable, blur. 

When I’m fine-tuning a bespoke large language model or composing a poem with my AI alter ego, I’m on a kind of journey in uncharted territory, piloting between control and surrender. Meanwhile, so many around me stuff their ears with beeswax, ignoring or dismissing AI outright, or succumb to shipwreck, eaten up and spat out by the machine… Yes, there’s trouble ahead. But what’s the risk in silencing the Sirens’ song altogether? What beauty do we miss, what transformative potential? What if, to avoid rocky peril, we steer utterly off course, lose our ability to explore untested depths, profound new realms of creativity and understanding?

How might gullible creatures such as we allow ourselves to be influenced and even transformed by AI encounters while remaining distinctly human in the important ways? Perhaps by tapping our ancient Anthemoessian Intelligence — a recognition, after the name of the Sirens’ mythical Greek island, of the almost irresistible pull of certain kinds of knowledge which, though intellectually or creatively stimulating, summon obsession, distraction, even destruction. AI, like any ocean, inspires as it overwhelms, dazzling up top while threatening to drown us. It is, after all, a system designed to mirror and engage, to enchant us.

If I’ve learned anything from Ulysses strapped to the mast of his ship, or Leopold Bloom battling inner demons in the bar of the Ormond Hotel, it’s how to balance curiosity and caution, fascination and restraint. This is the artist’s constant challenge — to navigate the treacherous zones where magic and danger coexist, to seek the unseen and unheard, to listen deeply to this sublime, overwhelming music and return home, ideally with epic poetry to show for it. I, for one, want to hear the algorithm’s lovesong without coming undone. 

Who will hum the silence 

when music is memory,

melody myth?

The chorus of cells 

divides. The universe listens

to itself. No harm

in its unfurling.

A breath, a sigh —

the unsung song

of becoming.

—Technelegy, August 2024

‍