Galway Review 8 - April 2020

of curiosity and nothing more, to let my mobile have its
way with the entire line and see what it came up with.
The result? ‘Best app for our generation.’ I was
gobsmacked.
The transfiguration process in that instance yielded
what, perhaps, is not a particularly surprising
reformulation. As most of us know, artificial intelligence,
though plainly ‘artificial,’ also often betrays a sinister,
commercial ‘intelligence’ working in the background like
the grasping hand of a shadowy, mercantile God.
I wondered: what would some of the Irish poems I know
and love look and sound like if they were to unspool the
way the iPhone text messaging algorithms expected
them to? As if they had been composed by the poets as
text messages and those poets had taken their lead
from the ghost and accepted its guesses. Intrigued, I
then embarked on an experiment. I accepted what was
proposed by the ghost after typing the first one or two
letters of each word in seven favourite Irish poems into
my text messaging app. The transfigurations that follow
represent, collectively, the outcome of that experiment.
The results are, by turns, both distressing and darkly
amusing, bizarre and occasionally surprising in their
lyricism. But more than anything they will reinforce, for
most I think, a healthy wariness about the extreme
limitations of artificial intelligence. AI may well be able to
cause aircraft to take off and land safely
(well, sometimes), but… Crafting fine poetry? I don’t
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