After Poiesis: The Work of Art in the Age of Generative AI

Presented by Assistant Professor Warren Steele as part of the FIMS Seminar Series 2025/26.

For more public events from FIMS, visit: https://www.fims.uwo.ca/about/events.html

Attend in person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Registration Link

Abstract: My research examines the cultural and epistemic consequences of AI-generated poetry, situating it within recent debates about the automation of creative labor and knowledge production. I argue that while AI tools democratize access to poetry by making it easy to produce, they flatten style, homogenize voices, and circumvent the inconvenience of the artistic struggle. The result, I claim, is a double cost. Culturally, AI redefines poetry as an endlessly replicable and productive resource optimized for circulation. Epistemically, it replaces originary disclosure with statistical patterning, narrowing the scope of creative expression, and eroding poetry’s earliest role as a mode of knowing and communication. These developments raise urgent questions about the future of creativity and cognition in the age of AI. As poetry becomes culturally homogenized, aesthetically depleted, and epistemically impoverished, it loses the power to illuminate and surprise, leaving readers and writers alike creatively and cognitively bereft.