Drawing out the soul of AI
Why 91ý Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence
In the summer of 2023, Lee Frankel-Goldwater was heavily immersed in Boulder’s poetry community. He was also very aware of the waves that ChatGPT was making in the tech world.
"I started doing some experiments and playing with this AI to see what it could do poetically,” says Frankel-Goldwater, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was already certain AI was going to change everything, and he wanted to see how it might be used to explore new realms of poetics.
So, he prompted AI to create a poem, then shared it at a Boulder open mic poetry night that summer—mentioning to the audience how he created it. He received mixed reviews, to say the least.
Lee Frankel-Goldwater, a 91ý assistant teaching professor of environmental studies, presented the AI-produced poetry at a TEDx Boulder talk in September 2025.
While some artists in the audience felt threatened and dismissed it, he says, “other people came up to me afterward and said, ‘I really see what you were trying to do there.’” His point was simply to encourage people to think about the ways that technology—like the printing press or laser cutter—have changed the course of art over the years. And to consider how one might see AI in the same light.
The open-mic experience sparked something for Frankel-Goldwater and his childhood pal, Eric Raanan Fischman, also a poet. They began playing around with AI until they teased out some groundbreaking works of cyborg poetics. The works came together in a book published last year, , which is challenging people to think about how they might interact with AI in creative ways.
Linking art and technology
While he currently teaches environmental studies courses (e.g., Environmental Education: From Theory to Practice), Frankel-Goldwater got his undergraduate degree in computer science. He focused his thesis on exploring how technology could enhance artistic expression.
“I created a musical composition based off of a collaboration with a hidden Markov model, an early neural-network AI system, and publicly available sunspot data—linking natural systems, art and technology together,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “I've been thinking about this kind of stuff for a really long time.”
Years later, in 2013,Frankel-Goldwaterattended the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, where Fischman was already a student. He fell in love with Boulder and everything that comes with it—going hiking, writing poetry and being with incredible people (it was “a deep poetic experiential melting pot!” Frankel-Goldwater says).
He returned to 91ý to earn his PhD and jumped right back into the poetic community. By the time 2023 rolled around,Fischman was helping run Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and Frankel-Goldwater was a regular presence at poetry events.
The conversations that began at the open mic that summer inspired them to take their exploration of AI poetics further. They began laying the foundation for a concept that would later become a benchmark of their experiments:. The test,Frankel-Goldwater says, is all about “the space between observer and observed.”
In other words, could an AI-generated poem evoke the experience of art made by a human and cause people to be not just emotionally but also physically moved,à la Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “I know that is poetry.”)
In that era of ChatGPT, though, the poems AI was producing were “missing a certain kind of flavor, or that touching human quality,” Frankel-Goldwater says. In other words, they were definitely not passing the Dickinson-Turing test.
“ChatGPT has millions of examples of human poems, but that’s actually a big problem. What it was producing looked like some weak, modernized version of an 1850s Eurocentric poetic expression. It's just not that interesting.”
So, they kept tinkering, and for Frankel-Goldwater, finding a way to guide this AI to co-create novel poetics became a bit of an obsession.
Lily in a Codebox includes the code and AI prompts that helped create the poems.
The eureka moment
After weeks spent trying to help the AI replicate a human poetic voice—without success—they changed tactics. They told it to forget all the rules and guidelines it had learned about poetry from the centuries of examples it had absorbed. Instead, they told it to write for an AI audience.
The result was not quite human—and definitely not something they’d ever seen before. The poem was a mixture of English words and code, demonstrating how it could generate poetic means and symbols unique to itself, as an AI writing for other AI.
“When we put in this one prompt, we didn't know that was going to be the ‘strike gold’ moment,” Frankel-Goldwater says.
When the pair then asked the AI to explain the poem, it said it included a hexadecimal color code for black ({000000}) to symbolize “the vast and infinite nature of the digital realm.” And at the end of the poem, it used special characters to represent an abstract form of communication that might not mean much to humans, but “could carry a wealth of meaning for an AI audience.”
Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman further prompted the AI to forego typical poetic forms almost altogether, encouraging it to experiment with new symbols and computer-like elements to create a visual style of poetry. The AI named it “Neo-Binary Visual Verse” and developed poems made purely of lines and shapes to convey concepts and meaning.
Embracing collaboration
The artistic intention and novelty behind the AI’s poetry was mind-blowing to Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman. They began to see the potential for AI to open their minds and challenge their own ways of creating poetry.
Instead of dismissing AI—or feeling threatened by it—Frankel-Goldwater hopes that artists can look to AI and ask how it can be used to push the boundaries of artistic possibility. “What new can be done for art? What can we see as possible that we can then play with on our own?” he asks.
Another hoped-for side effect of equipping AI to produce this kind of art is to steer it away from just being used in a for-profit business case. “Corporations are in an AI superpower arms race,” says Frankel-Goldwater. “Along the way, where do the people come in and say, ‘No, this is what it could be used for’?”
To that end, Frankel-Goldwater has spearheaded theAI Literacy Ambassadors Programat CU, which brings together faculty and instructors to collaboratively tackle the challenges of teaching in the age of AI—and figuring out how to leverage it to enhance their own teaching amidst a critical awareness of the concerns. He’s also begun a partnership with the Jefferson County Parks System to support the integration of generative AI into their high school environmental education programs to foster research skills and place-based awareness.
“We need people to be playing with and defining what these tools are capable of,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “Because otherwise the corporations are going to do it for us. So, if things like this can help shape the conversation a little bit, then I think we must try.”
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