This is why there is growing anti-AI sentiment. It is always extractive. You can never just enjoy a poem, you need to use it. You need to extract its value for shareholders. Get a life.
Creatives have always found inspiration from what they consume (AI has nothing to do with it). My partner writes, and eventually gets to the point where she has to take a break from plotting and writing and watch tv shows or read books. When she says she needs to refill her well, I know she's about to want to watch tv shows again for a little bit.
I design games. I can't even count the number of times something someone said, or a game I've played or watched a review of, has sparked an idea for new game, especially a board game (which most of the time doesn't work out once it gets in front of players, but that's okay). It's probably been over a hundred times by now.
People love highlighting quotes from poems and stories that they find inspirational for their own lives somehow. You want to know how I know? Kindle used to tell me, with saying how many other people highlighted a specific passage (it might still do that, but I mostly listen to audiobooks right now, so of course I won't see them). Also social media is flooded with people sharing quotes from various books or poems or sayings from people.
That's all this is.
But because it's said by someone who works with A.I. and thus is thinking about the quote with that frame of reference, you had to twist it into some anti-A.I. sentiment, implying that he's doing something perverted or not normal by daring to find inspiration in a quote.
Bukowski was a fan on new technology even towards the end of his life:
> “Yes, you have a strange project: electronic books. It might be the future as more and more people find that the computer is such a magic thing: time-saver, charmer, energizer.”
No one can say what he would have thought of AI for sure but I think he would have appreciated ability to reduce drudgery on this thoughts on factotum[1] work.
1. Why yes, that is a cheesy reference to his book of the same name. ;)
> On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed with the MacWrite II word processing program. By January 18 of the next year, the computer was up and running and so, after a brief period of fumbling and stumbling, was Bukowski. His output of poems doubled in 1991.
This cracked me up. I only used ~~one~~ two of his poems and enjoyed most of the others. Betting on the Muse was $2.09 on Amazon, which is a good ROI, I think.
Bukowski worked as a mailman. I had that job too. It was an awesome job. I got through like 9 hours of audiobooks a day.
Only issue was nobody sends mail anymore -- the elderly, Christmas and spam -- so when there was no mail, you'd work an hour and then you'd only get paid one hour. So most people were students, or their spouse did the heavy lifting.
Other than the pay, it was a great job though. I worked in snowstorms (and regular storms!) and in >37C (~100F) -- I got a big sombrero which looked a bit silly but did the job.
Then I'd go home and work on genetic algorithms. And then when the pay arrived at the end of the month -- 800 Euros (909 American), I had to wonder if I wasn't doing it backwards -- I should be getting paid to work on genetic algorithms all day, and then at the end of the day I should run up and down staircases for several hours for free.
Surely the irony isn't lost upon you that they literally are advocating for getting a life.