ITP Alum Ross Goodwin was recently featured in an article for Colby News, When the Ghost in the Machine is a Poet. The following is an excerpt:
He described his personal journey with language, writing, and large language models, including a moment of discovery that occurred when he was a graduate student in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program about a decade ago.
Back then, he got access to the university’s high-performance computing facility and trained his own large language models to write poetry that turned out to be both weird and interesting.
“It conjured imagery in a way that I had not seen generative text do before, and that, to me, was sort of the mark of something that would be an obsession for me over the next few years,” Goodwin said. “Because it had, I think, the potential to augment human creativity in a real way.”
One of the major arguments against AI is that it increases human isolation by replacing human interaction with simulated companionship, but Goodwin’s work shows that it doesn’t have to be that way. In one of his experiments as a graduate student at NYU’s ITP, described as an art school for engineers and an engineering school for artists, he put a large language model inside an antique camera and instructed it to narrate an image, location, and time.
“You could take a picture with it, and it would print out a receipt of a poem based on the photo you captured in real time. It was like a text Polaroid,” Goodwin said.
He’d tuck the contraption into a backpack he’d wear with a printer on his waist and walk around the city, just pressing the button to take snapshots and print poetry.
“It definitely invited a lot of interesting conversations and just interesting moments in time that I have captured on these receipts,” he said.