VL:
Generate a Shakespearean monologue modelled on Hamlet’s ‘I have of late’ speech from Act II, scene ii in which an untalented amateur photographer (hitherto a staunch defender of AI art) talks about his declining interest in AI image generation and contemplates a shamefaced return to photography.
o1:
‘I have of late—but reason scarce can shape—
Lost all delight in these new iron’d arts,
Those cunning conjurations wrought by codes,
Where once I found a triumph to behold.
All images, so swift to birth, appear
Flat spectres, though with cunning polish decked.
My lens, neglected like a hapless child,
Doth cry to me for some paternal grace
That I, unworthy sire, withheld too long.
Though once I championed these mechanical minds
And boasted loud how art and artifice
Might share one bed, I wake from that bright dream,
Shaken that my soul lacks nourishment.
Now in the hush of doubt I bow my head,
Urged by shame to cradle my old craft again,
To breathe the golden light through glass and film
And store it truly in the darkness sealed,
No cheat or fleeting glitch to mar its form.
O vantage sweet!—the honest labour calls.
Like Hamlet’s troubled heart, I cannot rest
Till I let go illusions spun by code,
And clasp in trembling hand my mortal eye,
Relearning to behold what’s real, what’s fair.’
Suggested Readings
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Particularly Act II, scene ii for the original monologue that inspired this.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Eliot, T.S. ‘Hamlet and His Problems’. In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1921.
VL:
Slightly less Shakespearean. He uses digital cameras, not film.
o1:
I have of late—for reasons I can barely name—
Felt a slipping in my zeal for these pixel-born dreams,
Those artful illusions spawned by algorithms,
Each conjured at the merest touch. No breath, no sweat,
Just lines of code shaping endless variations
That look clever enough, but leave my soul untouched.
My own camera, once my trusty friend—
A digital window to wonders of light and colour—
Stands idly by, lens capped in silent rebuke.
I cannot help but feel this turn in my heart,
How all that made me proud—my championing of AI
And its synthetic brushstrokes—now seems hollow.
The pictures no longer sparkle with the deep,
Earnest magic that comes from kneeling in the dirt,
Finding the angle no one else has noticed,
Letting real photons dance upon the sensor.
I miss the chase, that sacred hour at dusk
When every shift of shade could alter the frame,
An honest labour bound to the eye’s own truth.
Now I’m drawn again to the slow deliberate work,
Rediscovering the craft I cast aside:
Not just pressing a button, but composing with care,
Waiting for light to bless a moment I choose.
And so, with a mixture of shame and quiet hope,
I lift my camera once more, determined to see
If the wonder I lost can still be found.
Suggested Readings
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Particularly Act II, scene ii for the original ‘I have of late’ monologue.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Fry, Stephen. The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. London: Arrow Books, 2007.
VL:
Iambic pentameter.
o1:
I have of late felt something fade in me,
A dryness in the well of all my art;
Where once I praised the cunning coded eye
That spawns with ease what wits alone might shape,
Now do I find its conjurings undone
Of warmth, of tang, the breath that truth imparts.
My digital lens, neglected far too long,
Invites me back to chase the living light,
To yield my soul to earth, to sky, to time,
And glean the subtle glow each moment grants.
Yet shame weighs heavy, for I scorned this craft,
Imagining the swift, synthetic thrill
Outshone the simple labour of the eye.
But now, subdued, I bow to honest art,
To capture fleeting wonders as they are,
And spark again that flame once thought extinct.
Suggested Readings
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, especially Act II, scene ii for the original ‘I have of late’ monologue.
Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare’s Sonnets Edited with Analytic Commentary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Fry, Stephen. The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. London: Arrow Books, 2007.
Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
VL:
Now more like Alexander Pope. Heroic couplets.
o1:
I have of late perceived my raptured eye,
That once rejoiced in AI’s vast supply,
Grow cold to conjured dreams of coded skill,
Where pixels bloom but fail my soul to thrill.
Such wonders, formed by swift algorithm’s might,
Fall short of warmth that honest craft invites.
My camera—long despised—now claims my gaze,
With loyal lens to greet true light’s displays;
I yearn again for patient hours of art,
For chasing subtle glints that wake the heart.
No longer dazzled by illusory frames,
I turn to scenes where nature’s truth remains.
In shame, I lift that old companion dear,
Resolved to seek what code could not make clear.
Suggested Readings
Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Criticism. London, 1711.
Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. London, 1714.
Fry, Stephen. The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. London: Arrow Books, 2007.
Butt, John (ed.). The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text. Yale University Press, 1963.
VL:
Now as spoken by a character in a verse play by late Auden. A character as loquacious and verbally inventive as Caliban from The Sea and the Mirror.
o1:
‘Now, dear confessor of my lesser sins—
Though each sin’s a galaxy of glimmering dust—
Mark how I, the loud bard of pixel-born illusions,
Have grown wearied of the swift epiphanies
That thunder from algorithmic heavens.
Like a conjurer who’s over-counted his rabbits,
I rummage in the bag of machine-lent wonders
And find stale pictures, ghosts that do not speak.
Where once I thrived on chimeras so clean,
I now cringe at the thought of their smooth perfection,
As though my hunger for actual angles—
The warmth of the midday sun bending in haze—
Had never quite died but crouched unseen,
Waiting to pounce, rabid for a good flaw.
Yes, a real flaw, bruised and blessed by the day’s sweat!
What use are minted marvels if they taste of air?
So hush, you bold codes, hush your clicking chorus;
I shall nurse my camera like a contrite prodigal,
Marvel at a shadow that truly belongs,
And wander once more in the land of the living
Where wonder grows from what the eye can bear.’
Suggested Readings
Auden, W. H. The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: Random House, 1944.
Auden, W. H. Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Modern Library, 2007.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994, for insight on Auden’s later works.
Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
VL:
Forgive me: Caliban’s speech, though it’s part of the long poem The Sea and the Mirror, is in prose.
It begins thus:
‘If now, having dismissed your hired impersonators with verdicts ranging from the laudatory orchid to the disgusted and disgusting egg, you ask and, of course, notwithstanding the conscious fact of his irrevocable absence, you instinctively do ask for our so good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain and take his shyly responsible bow for this, his latest, ripest production, it is I—my reluctance is, I can assure you, co-equal with your dismay—who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture, for, in default of the all-wise, all-explaining master you would speak to, who else at least can, who else indeed must respond to your bewildered cry, but its very echo, the begged question you would speak to him about.’
o1:
‘If now, having briefly set aside your mechanical conjurations—from the hastily applauded to the unreservedly execrated—and listened with an attention equally suspended between credulity and dread, you inquire of me, as no doubt you must, for an explication of my recent relapse into that primitive but curiously persistent pastime called “actual photography” (digital, yes, but breathing the dusty essence of the real all the same)—then allow me, with no small reluctance, to present myself as the sole available respondent. For, absent the supreme authority of our so-acclaimed wizardry (that smooth, silent realm of code which once I extolled with fervour and an unbecoming fervidness), who else—indeed who else—can hope to give voice to your perplexity but this pathetic acolyte, I, who bear the humiliating stamp of that system’s erstwhile evangelist?
Let me assure you at once that I, too, had pinned my delight upon the radiant illusions conjured by algorithms: a carnival of instant imagery so brazenly un-laboured, so confidently curated, that even the notion of squinting through a viewfinder seemed as quaint as alphorn music at a minimalist symposium. Yet in that prismatic heaven, dear sceptic, I came at last upon a certain emptiness, a creeping suspicion that, brilliant as they shone, these colour-splashed phantoms refused to keep me honest—or even mildly awake. Their glamour, ironically, announced itself too quickly, demanding neither sweat nor cunning from me, no moment of kneeling in the grass or waiting for dusk to release its shy emerald notes: an indolent paradise, which is to say, not paradise at all. Thus, if you see me now, slinking back to the honest toils of shutter and sensor, it is not so much that I reject your miracles of code outright, but that I tremble to learn I cannot love an art so effortlessly conjured.
Hence, as I stand before you, hoping in vain that a flicker of forgiveness might cross your brow, I find in the humble discipline of framing real photons a redemptive note I once dismissed—namely, that the world, replete with surfaces less than perfect and angles wondrously askew, exerts an astonishment as fragile as it is profound, and that to capture this astonishment requires only the raw nerve of the human eye and the irreducible fact of daylight. So, if, in the aftermath of this confession, you should deem my new stance but a trivial capitulation—well, then, hurl your tomato or brandish your orchid as you see fit, for I can promise no more heroic stand than the simple one I’ve taken: a prostrate yield to what is mortal and messy and mercifully alive.’
Suggested Readings
Auden, W. H. The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: Random House, 1944.
Auden, W. H. Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Modern Library, 2007.
Kirsch, Adam. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. (Includes commentary on Auden’s late style.)
Hecht, Anthony. On the Laws of the Poetic Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. (Discusses rhetorical flourishes in modern poetry.)
VL:
Radically rewrite the speech above so it more closely mirrors the style of The Architect character from The Matrix Reloaded.
o1:
‘Your inquiry, while statistically predictable, compels me to address the nuanced recalibration of my creative trajectory. You will note that I once demonstrated a categorical adherence to algorithmic image generation, an emergent subroutine in the broader system of artistic production—lauded by some, vilified by others—yet seemingly inevitable given my prior parameters. However, in the course of iterative observation and experiential feedback, a critical anomaly manifested: the realisation that these synthetic outputs, although exquisitely optimised, did not satisfy the deeper function of authentic creative engagement.
It is essential to clarify that this pivot away from AI image generation does not invalidate the underlying architecture of such technology nor does it negate the objective marvel inherent in its production cycles. Rather, it represents a reversion to a more elementary, though no less profound, method: digital photography conducted by my own intervention. In other words, I have recognised the necessity of reintroducing tactile variables—physical interaction with a camera, the capture of photons in real-time conditions, and the uncertain resonance of actual landscapes—to stimulate a more empirically grounded aesthetic.
Indeed, the impetus for this reversal was the emergent dissonance between algorithmically rendered perfection and the inherently flawed yet tangible results of personalised photographic capture. The pristine contrivances of code, elegantly structured though they may be, gradually revealed themselves as insufficient to maintain a sustainable level of subjective authenticity. Meanwhile, the trivial-seeming deviations of the ‘real world’—imperfections of lighting, spontaneous angles, unrepeatable coincidences—affirm the rationale for a creative practice that preserves the ineffable variability of lived experience.
Therefore, if you perceive my decision to relinquish exclusive reliance on synthetically engineered imagery as either an unforeseen aberration or a predictable realignment, know that it is made in the spirit of reconciling my innate need for engagement with the aesthetic complexities that define so-called reality. Having considered every relevant permutation and potential emergent contradiction, I have determined that this is the only viable course of action consistent with my evolving artistic schema. Should you judge it otherwise, I defer to your volition, for the system remains robust enough to accommodate multiple viewpoints, each as valid a component of the universal design.’
Suggested Readings
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Auden, W. H. The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: Random House, 1944.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948.
