Weirding AI: Fine-Tuning for Poets & Artists
This workshop has limited capacity, reserve your spot now to secure your place!
This 2-day online workshop invites poets, artists, and technologists to explore the surreal, queer, and enchanting edge of AI-generated poetry. Together, we will fine-tune our own AI voices—not just by prompting models, but by composing the training datasets that shape how AI speaks, dreams, and glitches.
Instead of simply generating text, you’ll curate the very corpus the machine learns from: your to-do lists, spam folder, sermons, cringe diaries, and weather reports. This is not about polishing language. It’s about building a strange choir—a hybrid voice that borrows, misfires, plagiarizes, and surprises. We’ll see dataset creation as a poetic act, and fine-tuning as a new kind of authorship that blends constraint, performance, and remix.
We’ll explore AI not as a tool, but as a collaborator in an evolving lineage of algorithmic writing: from Dadaist cut-ups and Oulipo constraints to Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing and Kathy Acker’s embodied piracy. We’ll touch on AI as mirror, medium, and monster—a site where language gets weird, porous, and collective.
Concepts We’ll Explore:
- Ambient Poetics & AI: What does it mean to author via ambience? What’s the vibe of a plagiarized machine?
- Data as Spellcraft: Curating training data as a poetic ritual: what you choose matters more than what you prompt.
- Divination & Diffraction: AI as a mirror for the subconscious, a tarot deck of probabilistic dreams.
- Performance & Personhood: Giving your AI poet a voice, a body, and a stage.
- From Prompting to Fine-Tuning: Why shaping the model’s memory can be more powerful than crafting the perfect prompt.
This workshop is for poets, artists, and technologists eager to experiment with AI not just as a tool, but as a co-creator—one that challenges, surprises, and extends our sense of poetic authorship.
Course Logistics
Dates: Tuesday, November 18 + Thursday, November 20, 2025
Times: Tuesday + Thursday, 5:00 – 8:00 PM PST
(Total: 6 hours)
Location: Online
Cost: $250
Scholarship: We also offer Diversity Scholarships.
Apply by November 11, 2025.
Experience Level: Beginner to Advanced
Requirements:
• Participants only need to have a PC or Mac laptop—no prior software installation is required. We’ll use browser-based tools like v0.dev, Google Colab, and Hugging Face, which should ensure accessibility without complicated setup.
Additional Information:
• No Refunds or Exchanges.
• View our FAQ here.
• Contact [email protected] with any questions.
Workshop Outline
- Algorithmic Poetics: How simple Markov models shaped early AI poetry
- LLM Instructions & Fine-Tuning: Customizing AI’s voice, tone, and poetic form
- AI as Performance: Crafting personas, reading AI poetry aloud, and staging hybrid human-machine works
About Technologies
This workshop blends AI tools, development platforms, and creative writing techniques to help participants craft their own AI-driven poets.
- AI & Fine-Tuning
- GPT & Open-Source LLMs – For generating and shaping poetic text
- Development Tools
- v0.dev and other AI-assisted IDE – For prototyping generative poetry
- Hugging Face & Google Colab – For accessing and fine-tuning AI models
- Data & Text Curation
- Google Sheets / Excel – Organizing poetic datasets
- Performance & Interaction
- Text-to-Speech & Voice Modulation – Bringing AI poetry into performance
Educational Goals
Participants will leave with:
- A functioning AI poet or companion, fine-tuned to their creative vision
- A methodology for curating datasets that shape AI-generated text
- A deeper understanding of the history of computational poetics, from Tzara’s Dadaist cut-ups to contemporary LLMs
- A critical engagement with AI’s role in voice, tone, and the hybridization of language
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