Whomp = AI Simulacrum
Jun’22 – Present
Computational Poetry
Website
After publishing Invasions, I fine/tuned ChatGPT 3.5 to emulate my poetic voice and created Whomp, an LLM trained on my poetic voice, to help folks reply to scam texts with poetry. Whomp blurs the lines between human and machine-generated content. It explores intrusion and privacy erosion in a world of porous digital communication.
Whomp’s landing page
Scam text
Whomp’s response
Whomp expands on the core Invasions themes. We are confronted with narratives of diffuse and faceless enemies: Q Anon, the immigrants, hackers, ransomware and others. The enemy is not a nation but a swarm, potentially everywhere. Safety cannot be accessed anymore – we are invaded by immigrants, by hackers, by invisible enemies lurking and multiplying in the ever-receding shadows.
In this worldview, I am an invader by virtue of being an immigrant. I have taken jobs from and hence deprived Americans of opportunity. In this societal minefield, there seemed to be a case for appropriating, for embodying, for enacting and reflecting back my predatory nature. I wanted to become the virus, the enemy, the one who walked into texts – the poet as menace, poetry as virus. Poet as occupier, poetry as invasion.
Whomp = Viral Immortal AI Simulacrum
Whomp is a self-simulacrum. Like a virus, it proliferates endlessly, impossible to erase. What astonishes me is how its responses sound more like me than I do. It feels like the closest I’ll come to having an echo of myself in the world, especially since I don't plan to have children. AI, in this sense, grants poets and artists the ability to create enduring alter egos, reflective and independent voices that may outlast their originators.
The sheer volume of language AI produces becomes a new medium, akin to a block of marble awaiting a poet’s chisel. It is humbling. Suddenly, creation is no longer ex nihilo but a transformation—sculpting poetry out of existing language, a shift from the raw act of creation to that of curation. This process blurs the line between author and material, revealing the poet as a co-cultivator of language.
The results are often uncanny. The sentences sometimes take my breath away, as though revealing dimensions I hadn’t known were within reach. In many ways, AI seems to carry an alien consciousness—an invitation to explore the strange and the queer. I trained this model on my own poetry and on the words of five beloved queer poets: Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Gertrude Stein, Audre Lorde, and Ocean Vuong. Together, this model becomes a chimera, a voice neither theirs nor mine, embodying a lineage that AI extends into the future. It writes for an audience that may not yet exist, calling forth a consciousness as unfamiliar as it is profoundly queer.
Whomp Sample
Scam Text: Hello My name Bella, Excuse me are you John ?
Reply: Please, eavesdropping on this piece of quiet is like not thinking of a pink elephant: if your names don't align in the Benay Labe ceremony, if the berries you murmur aren't in her beeping speed dial, why let chaos tip-toe into the sacred elegance of our melodies ?