UAE poet teams up with AI for new album

Dorian Paul Rogers, a poet, events curator and teacher in the UAE who goes by the stage name Paul D, has confronted some of the angst among the creative community stemming from artificial intelligence, by collaborating with AI tools for a new poetry album, The Phenomenology of Gray.

“I had some anger, scepticism and fear,” Rogers said, reflecting on when he first heard about various iterations of AI tools several years ago.

“I'm also a teacher, so I saw it [AI] through the educational lens … and I had this negative perspective that AI could be used to cheat an plagiarise.”

It was a TV-news segment, more specifically an episode of 60 Minutes on CBS, that changed how Rogers felt about how AI, and, in turn, how AI tools might be able to complement society.

In that segment, Alphabet-owned Google presented Bard, which later became known as Gemini, the company's AI chatbot that could answer complicated questions, write poetry and even generate photos and drawings.

Mr Rogers recalled how the segment helped to expand upon a famous six-word story, “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn”, by turning it into an in depth story.

“In literature it's known as one of the best six-word stories because it packs so much emotion without describing much,” said Rogers, referring to the news segment. “It was beautiful to see Bard give more explanation, assigning character names.”

“Suddenly a light bulb went off,” he said. “That would be pretty cool to prompt it and see if it could write a poem on self identity.”

Through a series of trial and error efforts with AI chatbot prompts, Rogers was eventually able to get Gemini to reflect on various themes close to his heart, and get it to reach a level of “quality, contemporary poetry.”

“I got very specific. Not only did I say 'give me a free verse' but I said, 'give me free verse poetry that does not rhyme, and let's make the poem reflect about the nostalgia of yard sales',” Rogers said, noting some of his lingering memories from growing up in Ohio and Georgia.

Once he was happy with the end result of his various prompts given to Gemini, Rogers later gave its composed responses a voice through a text-to-voice AI vocal generator application, ElevenLabs.

He later gave the voice and persona a name, Isis.

Rogers voice and lyrics are also prominent throughout the album, giving him the opportunity to compare and contrast with the thoughts provided by Gemini.

The end result is an eleven-track album he titled The Phenomenology of Gray. The inclusion of the word “gray”, said Rogers, is no accident.

“I wanted to play on the concept of grey in terms of black and white … When I was in my younger twenties, I felt certain things were definitely wrong and I needed to act, or certain people were bad just for doing something” he said.

“But I think grey helps to contextualise before we judge people,” he added, noting that the same could be applied to overall perceptions about artificial intelligence.

For all the promise presented by proponents of AI, there are also plenty of concerns. Some warn that the large language models and chatbots could be uncontrollable. Others say that AI could disrupt labour markets at an unprecedented scale, generating unrest across many demographics.

There are also concerns about those who make their living through the humanities and arts – that AI could nullify their skills and commodify the musical, illustrative and creative abilities.

Those fears were recently highlighted during a recent Apple product event, where the company's introduction video showed instruments, paint brushes, easels and various music products all being crushed, eventually revealing that they had all been replaced with an iPad.

“The destruction of the human experience, courtesy of Silicon Valley,” actor Hugh Grant wrote on X, formerly Twitter, immediately after seeing the advertisement.

Actress Justine Bateman asked: “Why did Apple do an ad that crushes the arts?”

Some critics even re-edited the advertisement to give it less of a destructive look. Apple later acknowledged to trade publication AdWeek that the advertisement “missed the mark”.

Several months later, a similar advertisement from Google promoting AI features in the context of the Olympics and athletics generated similar reactions, and was later pulled by the search giant.

In the UAE, where Mr Rogers calls home, the country has sought to be a leader in AI research while also emphasising guardrails for the quickly evolving technology.

Back in 2017, before AI was at the centre of the technology universe, the UAE announced the appointment of country's first AI Minister, Omar Al Olama, making him one of the first in the world to hold such a title.

Several years later, the UAE announced Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world's first dedicated AI university, to bolster research in the burgeoning computer science field of AI and attract talent from all over the world.

Recently, Sam Altman, founder and chief executive of the much-talked about and prominent AI technology company ChatGPT, told the World Government Summit that the Emirates would be well positioned to be a leader in discussions about a hypothetical global AI watchdog system.

The country also recently became the first in the Arab world to join 49 other countries to become part of the Hiroshima AI Process Friends Group, which is dedicated to AI safety and security.

The UAE's enthusiastic AI embrace, as well as its regulatory approach, has also inspired Mr Rogers with his unique poetry album approach.

“There's a lot of talk about job losses from AI but it could also create thousands of new jobs,” he said. “It's similar to when music went digital, so many people were so fearful, but 20 years later it's our reality, so either we're going to be afraid of it, or we're going to utilise it.”

“I didn't write a poetry album and say 'it's with the assistance of AI', … making it sound like me, I made AI an equal partner,” he explained.

The Phenomenology of Gray is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music.