Werner Herzog talked to the New York Times about narrating a new book of poetry generated by artificial intelligence.
Herzog, the German filmmaker known for his distinct voice and oddball personality, is the narrator of I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks, published earlier this month by Back Bay. The book is credited to code-davinci-002, an early version of the AI model that eventually became ChatGPT, and edited by friends Brent Katz, Simon Rich, and Josh Morgenthau.
A critic for Kirkus called the poetry collection “a gift for the young computer geek who has everything; for poetry fans, infuriating; for everyone else, waiting-room fodder.”
Herzog told the Times he wasn’t surprised that the editors thought of him for the project. “They had an understanding that I wasn’t the best choice—I was the only choice,” he said. “When you look at the text, it becomes quite self-evident.”
The newspaper published an audio clip of Herzog reading one of the poems from the book, “[God, the Universe, and Everything].” “All day, humans, time drag, drown away, beep beep, time cling, emotion drop, repeat,” the poem begins.
“In many of the poems, you hear a kind of longing,” Herzog told the Times. “The longing to participate in humanness. That was a decision I took: It has to be like a human imitating a human completely, and with a very deep longing.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
