
“Death Sentence: Poetry Consolation II” is a poem constructed by artificial intelligence algorithms based on the prison writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde and Botheuis, and read by Ai-Da, the poetry robot. The YouTube video is creepy for many reasons—British accent and beachy brunette tresses framing the English rose complexion, all bobbing atop Lucite-naked neck joint draped in tasteful floral scarf aside, it is not the uncanny emotional tenor and charismatic presence of Ai-Da (dubbed the humanoid robot ‘other’) that has the blood-and-bone poets trembling, nor is anyone unnerved by the superiority of the work. To ask, Is the poem good? is to miss the point. The more pressing questions are: What is there to gain with the automation of art-making—or of any labor? Who benefits? Who loses?
I have labored—in birth, over many a hot restaurant stove, at this essay. Labor in birth (and in cooking, though less so in writing) is, among other things, a very basic thing—physical toil. Birth, popularly, is a miracle. Miracles eclipse, if not outright deny, labor. It’s only natural, after all. My last name, by marriage, is of labored origin: Cooper. It is common, like Smith, which is the most common surname in the English language in the United States and Great Britain. A smith makes—made—kitchen tools, farm implements, armor, and weapons, all of which predate the English language. Coopers—barrel makers—first organized in Britain in 1298. Smiths didn’t organize until the late nineteenth century when the International Brotherhood of Iron Ship Builders formed their union in 1893. A union organizes to protect the interest of its members—to ensure a reasonable wage, for example, as well as safe working conditions. What motivated the coopers to take a collective approach to their trade six hundred years before the metalworkers? I suspect it has to do with the consumer. Merchants bought barrels; armies bought armor and weapons. Both markets are competitive, but the latter seems more in-house, more bespoke, like, I am His Majesty the King’s smithy.
Some while back, social media feeds were a-buzz with accusations that the powers-that-be at Starbucks were retaliating against employees who have unionized. On their website, Starbucks Workers United organizers assure interested parties that they have nothing against Starbucks—they love Starbucks. The FAQ page states that a union will argue for what is right and just regarding policy, wages, and protections. Outside of businesses such as hotels and linen service, unions—and especially food service unions—have a tenuous to non-existent presence in the hospitality industry. One explanation for the lack of worker representation among restaurant workers is that the workforce, for all its labor, is considered unskilled. I entered my first kitchen as a teenager with no more training or experience than having “cooked” the occasional box of Hamburger Helper. Eventually I went to culinary school to professionalize my trade, but I would remain fiercely attached to the romantic persona of the itinerant worker: I was a knife for hire, a pirate, and if one ship burned or I was thrown overboard, I’d simply join another rogue band of brigands. It was supposed to be dangerous. If I could barely afford rent and smokes and drinks—forget the dentist or health insurance—so be it. Unions? So last century. Argh.
When I began this effort, teachers in Columbus, Ohio had negotiated an end to a strike that forestalled the school year so that teachers could line the streets with signs demanding functional heating and air conditioning, smaller classes, and the inclusion—or reinstatement— of PE and arts education in the curriculum. Money was not at the forefront of this discussion, but the redistribution of money and resources is a core—and sore—issue of many disputes. Teachers, particularly, but also nurses (hell, UPS workers), are seen to hold sacred positions of service, not to be sullied with crass discussions of money. Add sex workers to the long and unofficial list, and mothers. The fruits of the labor are valued; the worker, ignored, disparaged—or worse, martyred.
Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal during the Great Depression (1929-1939), a worldwide devastation popularly thought to have been caused by the crash of the stock market, but also speculated to have been a progression of disasters including overproduction (due to modernized manufacturing technologies), diminishing exports, gross income disparity, and a drop in consumerism. Progress, efficiency, and contentment, then, tipped the twentieth century into massive unemployment and epidemic poverty.
The song, “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” written in 1937 by George and Ira Gershwin, appears in the movie A Damsel in Distress, a glittering bauble of Hollywood escapism available to the masses, in those dark days, for twenty-five cents. Unemployment that year was over fourteen percent, making even a quarter dear. Two years earlier, the Second New Deal created the National Labor Relations Board, which strengthened labor laws regarding workers’ rights and collective bargaining, as well as Social Security and the WPA (Workers Progress Administration), which put people to work building dams and bridges. The rhetoric rang loud with honor for the working man. The WPA also employed artists and writers. Unfortunately, it was an employment opportunity that later provided a convenient barrel for Senator McCarthy to shoot allegedly Communist fish.
After the Depression-ending war, the G.I. Bill paid the bill for men (and a few women) to educate themselves out of generational labor jobs such as coal mining and mill work. The dirty jobs. But somebody had to work the production line. As had often been the case, the jobs went to the immigrants (of all genders) who would take them. In his poem “Now I’m Bologna,” the poet José Olivarez works against any nostalgia for the so-called dignity of the hard-working immigrant experience: “you are what you do…/…you are what your children grow up to do.”
Art has long romanticized, propagandized, or otherwise forwarded an agenda regarding labor. Gustave Caillebotte’s “The Floor Scrapers” (1875) filters golden light across the bare backs of muscular men doing the hard work of beautifying urban interior space, mythologizing structures of class in Paris in the nineteenth century. While with “The Gleaners” (1857), Jean-François Millet pays homage to the shawled bent backs of the peasant women in the field, there is an inevitability—or, at least, perpetuity—to their place in his world. Gustave Courbet may come closest to the realities of generational labor with his two laborers in “The Stone Breakers,” boy and man side-by-side, knee-bent to the work.
In 2018, the National Portrait Gallery featured the exhibit, “The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers.” What romance there may be in the aesthetic is tempered with irony. In her photograph Kean: Subway Sandwich Artist, Shauna Frischkorn captures the essence of a Rembrandt self-portrait: the subject’s complex expression is illuminated against a deep dark background, the uniform visor settled upon the flaming red hair like a crown. The image commands, rather than serves. In Woman Cleaning Shower in Beverly Hills, artist Ramiro Gomez re-contextualizes a David Hockney work by removing the nude, bent figure of a white man, and replacing it with the dark, fully clothed figure of a yellow-gloved cleaning woman bent over the tile with a squeegee. These works force the observer into an inventory of their own ability to see—as well as their histories of seeing—the individuals who make the sandwiches and scrape the scum.
West: A Translation, by poet and former Utah poet laureate Paisley Rekdal, was commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The project is “a linked collection of poems that respond to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained” (westtrain.org). The linkage involves the Chinese Exclusion Act, implemented thirteen years after the railroad was finished, largely by the sweat of Chinese workers, who, when the job was done, garnered resentment from people who felt the Chinese were there to leech jobs away from citizens, and otherwise steal American pie.
Consider the hard-working and much maligned leech: a parasitic worm that, medicinally, has made the hero’s journey from miracle cure to quackery and back again to a place of honor in this scientifically and technologically advanced age. Unlike the birds and the bees and the ants, however, the leech has not improved its position in the lexicon. Pundits still use the word leech to identify and disparage those who they perceive as eating too much—or any—pie.
Blowback to educational loan forgiveness models this resentment. However, given the propaganda that swelled after World War II and continued to foam until liberal arts majors were drowning in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt based on the premise that the only jobs worth having would require a university degree—or two or three—just who should be forgiving whom? I was one of the many who rejoiced to be forgiven, only to have mercy revoked, with interest.
Joke: What did the PhD student say after graduation? You want fries with that?
Updated joke: After years of national and state-level arguments against raising the minimum wage to double-digits, McDonald’s now offers up to $17/hour starting wage with sign-up bonuses and, still, jobs go wanting. While the teachers of Columbus, Ohio exercised their collective right to strike for improved collective conditions, individuals—most notably among millennials and Gen Z—were quiet quitting, saying no to blind ambition, zero-sum competitive work environments, and, plainly, too much work for too little pay and too little time for themselves. The failures and successes of labor unions and collective bargaining are available for review; who knows what will happen as one individual worker bee rejects the hive, and then another, and another? Unless, less organized than the apiary species, they feel too vulnerable, away from the hive’s provisions, to leave.
Perhaps quiet quitting (reportedly, now, on the wane) is simply the latest iteration of leaving the rat race, but it feels different. In the past decade (and certainly exacerbated by the confines and pressures of a pandemic), many people have sought to make a living or work a side hustle by monetizing an interest, becoming a maker—brewers brewing kombucha and beer, candlemakers dipping tapers, the smithy at their home forge, melting and pounding metal to create one-of-a-kind knives. Artisan, small batch. It takes a village (and maybe a blog). Buy local. Modern makers would no doubt reject the notion that they were fetishizing labor, like Marie Antoinette role-playing in her vegetable garden. Making is real, honest, physical labor. And if it’s not simply a labor of love, but also delivers a payoff? That works, too.
I don’t cook or wait tables or bartend professionally anymore. I type and I read, so-called intellectual labor. Sometimes, I workshop. Rarely, I work out. I am always working, and seldom moving. My years in hot, high-pressure kitchens left me with bad knees and arthritis, but I miss the perpetual movement, the dance of the line. I miss the theater (and so, of course, devoured both seasons of The Bear). I don’t miss the basement wages, physical perils, and the psychological and emotional rollercoaster of it all, but I lament the loss of muscle tone I never had to work at back when the work depended on my body. I don’t miss misogynist sous chefs and belligerent diners and oven burns and a blade slipped into my thumb, but I sometimes miss a certain brand of vitality that came from producing a useful and occasionally openly appreciated thing through my skilled effort.
The fictional independent restaurant The Bear is located in Chicago, a hard city with a thick history of labor dispute and organization, from the efforts of unionizing legend Mother Jones to the Pullman Strike of 1894, the first national strike in U.S. history. Chicago is also famous for being a town that loves its cuisine— mom and pops to Michelin-starred—but even in a dedicated foodie environment, choosing to be a chef is akin to choosing to be an actor, or a writer. It’s a professional choice that strikes fear in many a concerned parent, dramatized in The Bear through the character Emmanuel Adamu, father to the talented and ambitious young chef Sydney Adamu, a dad who worries that ambition and talent aren’t enough for his daughter to sustain a livelihood. Restaurants open, and they close. Rare is the insurance plan and the 401K. You’ve got to make it big, or make it at all, before you’re too old, and the work is too hard or too scarce. We root for the chefs and workers on The Bear. Who doesn’t love an underdog, especially a fictional one? In real life, the struggling artisan loses support quick if their plight is inconvenient, unattractive, unromantic, too expensive, or replaceable. A beautifully forged knife, in skilled and appreciative hands, we are reminded in an episode—every episode—of The Bear, is a thing of beauty and utility, a tool for creativity, jealously guarded by its chef-owner. In culinary school I, as every other hungry wannabe chef, regarded my German-crafted high carbon steel blades as extensions of my arm. But the average cook can buy a complete and serviceable set of rainbow-colored Cuisinart kitchen knives on Amazon for twenty bucks and up, with free shipping, no smithy required, none missed.
Actors from The Bear showed up on the picket lines, their solidarity a sincere and joyful echo of their fictional camaraderie. There are gains to be made for working actors in this real life drama, and their usefully popular presence provides leverage toward the realization of those gains. The actors wield power, as we, the audience-customers, love them, feel we deserve them, and will resent and protest the loss of them. If the characters they play in The Bear were to mimic real life, they’d have nobody but themselves, could not rally and appeal for better conditions, and in the event of failure, could only pull themselves up by their apron strings and pack their knives, hit the want ads.
When I got my undergrad degree at 48, I applied to those jobs that required a university degree, over thirty of them, and was hired by none of them, so I went back to the kitchen, a small one where the commercial dishwasher accommodated only flatware and plates, so the pots and sheet pans and bowls had to be washed by hand. The floor drain backed up almost daily due to the bacon grease, requiring the human dishwasher to get in there and clear it out, then mop up the mess. Restaurant work is dirty work, even with a culinary degree.
Martha Stewart, consummate maker and model entrepreneur, weeded her garden, cleaned her windows, and made soup, and became a mogul. In middle age, I was a (barely above) minimum wage earner with a college degree and a pile of debt, making sandwiches and mopping floors. I was ashamed of my job, and I’m ashamed of those feelings now, because it’s not about the job, which just needs to get done. It’s about dignity and actionable respect, including self-respect, for the one who labors. In this light, the goals of quiet quitting are not so alien to those of collective bargaining. Quiet quitting, if it persists long enough to resemble a movement, may even push broader systematic change, the drip drip drip that puts the fatal crack in capitalism.
No bargaining.
But back to “Death Sentence”: in the age of Siri and Alexa, what should be so scary about naked Ai-Da and her algorithmic verse (aside from the fact that these service models are unfailingly gendered female)? There is, after all, poetry in math. The threat is not the death of poetry and art: the threat is atrophy. While a poem may be beautiful or disturbing, good or bad, transformative or boring, it’s the hard, dirty work of poem-building that matters. Interacting with AI is part of that work—evidenced in avant-garde projects and digital experiments such as language generators, not new. The former tweeting platform with the generic body spray rebrand blew up over a chapbook contest win by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram for their AI-influenced manuscript, A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content (Diagram/New Michigan, 2024). The choice seems very much aligned with the aims of the experiment-positive online magazine Diagram, who tweeted, “We don't have any objection to writers using LLMs as long as it's done thoughtfully, craftily, is disclosed up front, and gets us somewhere interesting / powerful / moving / fun.” Poets including Kazim Ali pointed out poetry’s long legacy of experimentations with tech and technique. Detractors, however, bewailed what they believed to be a subversion of (individual, human) imagination. Never mind that the author of the chapbook teaches or has taught in creative departments at numerous prestigious universities, is the director of the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival, and likely possesses and employs a very healthy imagination.
Books3 dataset uses published work “downloaded from pirate sources,” according to The Authors Guild, to train language models for various companies. Authors can type their name into the search box and see which and how many of their intellectual properties pop up. Outrage by authors currently centers around theft. Alongside the outrage flows the fear that art can be outsourced to the machine.
Is it possible? Probable? I am glad to be rid of my low-paying, no-benefits freelance copywriting gigs now, but those jobs kept me and mine afloat. Industry standard was to write at a clean but uncomplicated fourth-grade level, a bar easily hurtled by AI. Were I still reliant on those paychecks for web pages about multi-family real estate and storage units, I’d likely, at 58, be scanning job sites for non-unionized restaurant work, and nowhere so electric as The Bear.
Where is embodied—humanly embodied—work valued, where is it essential? What does it mean to outsource the goddamn poem? I, too, am distracted by product—the revenue-making bit, even as my vital force depends on process. Without process, without going to work, I live an artificial life, I’m pink-slipped out of my only real and lasting gig, which is to labor, every day, for love and justice and whatever other gains exist.
Like many yet-to-be-seriously-affected observers, I’ve enjoyed the articulate and reliably emotive reels and posts from the actors involved in the SAG-AFTRA strike, still active at this writing, and activated after the Writers’ Guild of America strike (recently resolved after 146 days of labor stoppage, wherein the strikers persisted through such villainy as losing their shade when executives ordered the trees that lined the street at the site of the picket line severely pruned—out of season, no less, putting the trees themselves in peril). That’s a long time, 146 days, considering the essential nature of the service—nonstop streaming original content, somehow more essential than the disrupted sanitation service I remember during the NYC garbage strikes of the 1970s, when it was not public boredom at risk but public health, and Jimmy Hoffa, disappeared union activist for the Teamsters, was still the subject of headlines on many a front page.
Actors participating in the labor stoppage remain on strike in part to call attention to and reject the repeated and unpaid use of their image, a studio option made possible by advanced technologies already dramatized/satirized by the series Black Mirror, S6, E1, “Joan Is Awful.” Success of the writers’ strike carries a simple and terrifying message for the executive class: working people recognize insufficiency, and understand that an element of capitalism that can’t be outsourced or replicated is the consumer. A strike says, together we can demand better and get it, if the consumer understands what’s at stake, and how much there is to lose. SAG-AFTRA and WGA pulled off a neat trick by keeping the picket lines sprinkled with star-level comrades, and, with delicious irony, onscreen.
It's unlikely, if not ridiculous, that the end of the strike means the end of Hollywood executives’ aspirations for AI and its potential to do jobs currently accomplished through human labor. Schemers will scheme, computer scientist and Mozilla Foundation fellow Inioluwa Deborah Raji reports in The Atlantic, but the real concern, she writes, is the here and now. While the Elon Musks of the world dream their futuristic fantasies, AI is in the moment failing to walk a straight line, let alone explore its cosmic potential, dropping the ball on quotidian tasks, as an AI application did when it botched a schedule and left a disabled person without essential in-home care. AI is dangerous, writes Raji, but not as an entity coming to destroy the future. In its largely unsupervised and misunderstood state, it’s wreaking havoc in more prosaic areas than literary prose. As with Tesla’s beplagued driverless machines, with nobody at the wheel, somebody’s bound to get hurt.
In many art circles and English departments, any rhetoric around AI’s capacity to push human endeavor to greater heights—to evolve us—smacks of the lowest and cheapest of marketing strategies: AI will make our lives easier, freeing us up to take our inventiveness to new heights. Bunk, reeking of economic privilege— there is no “us” in this “our.” My dad—WWII veteran, beneficiary of the G.I. Bill, and lifelong Republican—was among the creative Mad Men who peddled that line to 50s housewives with boxed cake, spray furniture polish, and automatic dishwashers. But what if there’s a kernel of truth somewhere in there? What if AI makes our lives necessarily harder, and the freedom to invent is not a gift, but hard won? What if we have to labor for our evolution? Can we still do it, and together? Or will AI and its executives have us over a barrel, or inside of it, gasping for fresh air?
Irene Cooper is the author of the feminist noir novel Found, Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy, and spare change, finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award for poetry. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, Witness, Beloit Poetry Journal, Diagram, and elsewhere. Irene supports AIC-directed creative writing at a regional prison, teaches in community and at OSU-Cascades, and currently serves as an editor for Airlie Press. She lives with her people and Maggie in Oregon.
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