Carmine Starnino, “Poetry and Digital Personhood,” newcriterion.com/issues/2022/4/poetry-digital-personhood. An interesting summary of recent natural language processing developments. While not cited, it echoes debates about the way poetry is endemic to human being after Martin Heidegger’s work. This was a point taken forward in Hubert Dreyfus’s What Computers Still Can’t Do. At issue is the degree to which human minds are, in essence, not reducible to computation. The point made in the essay above is similarly that the pursuit of robopoetics is a red herring. Nonetheless, the essay cites the more interesting question which is the degree to which AI can be applied to manipulate human behavior, nonetheless. While incapable of poetry, computational approaches to language are beginning to excel at exploiting natural human empathy and emotions. In another register, it is interesting how so many video games have trafficked on the human feeling of frailty or what Heidegger referred to as the poetics of being towards death. The anxiety built into the video game is often precarious lives lost. While incapable of replicating Frost’s poetry, they nonetheless excel at generating clickbait.