In poetry, as in love, it’s the non-necessity of what follows that takes our breath away. Anything can happen. Anything can happen, and then whatever does happen could only have happened that way. We’re well trained to pick over the second part of this happenstance. Most features of form can be thought of as allowing choices to seem necessary, before they come to seem either correct or beautiful, audacious or dull. Destiny, compulsion and fetish (like genre, metre and metaphor) are useful when we want to redescribe anything that happens as the only thing that could have happened. We often need them to talk ourselves down from the ledge of infinite possibility. The satisfaction that such redescriptions provide is in proportion to the dizziness and excitement that threatens to upturn them, and which they work to contain. In return, we get back a little kick of agency; a pattern is just a mess that you’re always making.

From December 2020 to January 2021, Sam Riviere composed Conflicted Copy using Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2). GPT-2, first released a little over five years ago, was a large language model trained on eight million web pages, capable of responding to prompts with text that it generated on the basis of knowing what normally happens next. GPT-2 was a mess. As anyone who played around with it in the months after its launch might remember, it could produce plausible prose given strict parameters, but it was quickly liable to either become repetitive or veer off topic. The effect was a little ...