Art and Culture · Adaptation
The poet who trained an AI on her own poetry, then put it up on the wall at MoMA
Sasha Stiles, Kris Bones · New York, NY
Sasha Stiles fine-tuned a language model on her own poetry until it could answer back in something like her voice, then let a museum audience watch it think out loud for six months.
The person and the place
Sasha Stiles is a poet who lives and works near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones. She calls herself "a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet and language artist."
The problem she cared about
People kept telling her poetry and technology sat on opposite ends of something, one human, one mechanical. She didn't buy the split. "A lot of people think poetry and technology are antithetical, but I find them resonant," she told Scientific American.
The agency moment
In 2017 she read about the transformer models starting to power modern AI, and by 2019 she was feeding her own poems into GPT-2 to see what came back. She kept going until she had a real dataset, roughly 200 pages of her own poetry, fine-tuned into a model that knew her own style and vernacular, not just the poetry already sitting in the archives. She named the collaborator Technelegy and published a 2021 collection built from working with it.
What changed, with evidence
In 2025, the Museum of Modern Art invited her to fine-tune Technelegy again, this time on metadata from the museum's own text-art collection, and installed the result, A Living Poem, on its lobby wall from September 2025 through the following spring. The piece rewrote itself in verse, animation, and voice every sixty minutes, with a soundscape by Bones. Scientific American profiled the project directly. Not every critic was won over: The Brooklyn Rail's Terry Nguyen called the piece "not poetry, but rhetoric," writing that its output was "no less bland" than the spectacle around it. Stiles has been making her case for years anyway, and keeps building instead of arguing about it.
The move worth copying
You don't need a museum wall to try a smaller version. Know someone sitting on a lifetime of their own words, journals, sermons, or field notes? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"A lot of people think poetry and technology are antithetical, but I find them resonant." — Sasha Stiles, Scientific American
Sources
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Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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