Reimagining Poetry with AI

Dual Authorship Through Poetry and Machine Animation

By Oliver Garcia-Farina

Girl of Alabaster: Reimagined is an experiment in dual authorship between a human poet and machine-generated visuals. The project consists of an AI-read narration of my original poem paired with an animated Midjourney sequence of a marble bust slowly crumbling apart. My goal was to explore how AI can expand creative expression without replacing the human voice behind it.

I began with my original poem, written entirely by hand, and recorded an AI-generated reading of the text. Rather than using AI to write the poem, I used it as a collaborator in performance and visualization—allowing the machine to take on the role of interpreter while I remained the author. The animation, built from iterative Midjourney prompts, visualizes decay, fragility, and transformation as the statue fractures in sync with the poem’s emotional arc.

The slow erosion of the statue mirrors the poem’s themes of identity, vulnerability, and transformation. But it also symbolically represents the collaboration itself: the machine reshaping, fragmenting, and reinterpreting my work—yet never erasing me as the original creator.

This project argues for AI as a medium rather than an author. When used intentionally, it can illuminate new creative possibilities while keeping the human distinctly present. Girl of Alabaster is not a poem written by AI; it is a poem expanded by it.