In “A Living Poem,” artist and poet Sasha Stiles invites audiences to examine their relationships with artificial intelligence (AI), something that is increasingly relevant with the advent of ChatGPT and other AI programs. The exhibit, on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from Sept. 10 through the spring of 2026, features a single projector displaying a poem that is rewritten every 60 minutes. The poem is produced using a specific language model that receives unique prompts and is accompanied by a set of visuals and sounds. Stiles created this piece using a program called Technelegy, which the museum describes as her alter ego, an AI program that enhances her own voice and writing style.
One of the first projections that appeared onscreen during my viewing of this exhibit read “Once a poem finds you, it rewrites you,” followed by a second projection with the stanza “Look at a poem / and it looks back. / Read a poem / And it reads you. / Whisper a poem / and it leans in to listen. / Remember a poem / And it remembers / Everything you forgot.” What is fascinating about each of these textual displays is that they speak to both the power of poetry and the power of artificial intelligence. In a world where poetry is able to impact a person so deeply that it changes an aspect of who they are, artificial intelligence is now working to modify an individual’s essence, through enhancing their writing style or improving upon their ideas. I interpreted these projections as Stiles’ and Technelegy’s questioning of whether poetry and AI function in similar ways, and what the benefits and drawbacks of those similarities are. Can AI and poetry work in tandem, as Stiles appears to suggest, or should we be wary of that collaboration?
One of the other themes that “A Living Poem” speaks to is the human body and its relationship to art and technology. Another display that appeared during my visit read: “Please pay attention to the poems beneath your ribs: core, beat, shiver, lung, twinge, flutter, flesh, cell.” In this projection, the piece seems to argue that human sensation is valuable, which is ironic, coming from a work of art that was made with AI. However, this is the type of complexity that Stiles leans into throughout the piece. She reminds us that there are sensations that AI will never be able to experience, and it is those aspects of our humanity that we must lean into in order to preserve our autonomy. It is also those things that are the most poetic, in that they convey a range of human emotions that are unadulterated by AI.
Language is another theme that “A Living Poem” explores. One of the projections during my viewing of the exhibit read, “Language began as longing and still is,” while another read, “I open my mouth and exhale a truth still waiting for us to arrive.” Both of these statements point to the notion of language as a tool for grasping our reality, something that humans and AI struggle with in different ways. For humans, we are not always able to arrive at certain truths or forms of expression, just as AI is not always able to, even though that is what it is designed to do and is becoming more adept at doing so. Another screen read, “This isn’t output, it’s afterglow.” This made me reflect on the process of using language to formulate one’s ideas, a process which is often time-consuming — unless one is using AI, perhaps. The “afterglow” or satisfaction that the program appears to be referring to is something that humans uniquely experience whenever they arrive at a new conclusion. Stiles makes the viewer question whether AI experiences this too, as AI is known to be something that often hits stumbling blocks in attempting to describe things.
Ultimately, “A Living Poem” gives audiences a lot to think about in regards to artificial intelligence. With each new iteration of the poem, perhaps new questions appear or stay the same, begging the question of whether AI is generative or innovative. I personally think that Stiles was successful in capturing our relationship with technology, one that is full of hope and disappointment alike. Her choice to make this piece using AI captures the complexity of being able to view AI as both a tool and a cautionary tale, and makes audiences and artists consider the role that it might play in creating new forms of art.
