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Category: Science Fiction Poetry

Posts about poetry with science fiction elements.

The Transit Poetry Project – Proof of Concept (finally!)

Published by bryantohara on March 8, 2026

What if transit routes had personalities?
What if parts of a city could riff on a shared story?

For the past couple of years I’ve been tilting at a strange windmill:
I’ve been building a system that generates poetry based on MARTA bus routes in Atlanta.

Each route has its own personality (a bit like a D&D character sheet) There’s a central narrative based off of some of my own poems that can influence how that route “speaks”. The system generates poems in each route’s voice based off of local context like weather, traffic, and location.

I’ve finally put together an audio stream where some of the poems are read aloud with generated soundscapes:

MARTA Poetry Radio

Eventually I want the routes to interact with actual people and use more local data – that part I’m still working out.

Yeah, weird, I know.

But strange ideas sometimes lead to interesting places.

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Next AI poetry project – transit poems?

Published by bryantohara on November 1, 2024

Now that I’ve learned to turn weather data feeds into poetry, I want to take it to another level. For my next AI poetry project, I want to use MARTA public transit data to create poems with audio and visuals, but I want to use different prompts and/or workflows.

At the moment I’m thinking of riffing off an idea from The Ghettobirds collection: imagining MARTA as a sentient being, with the data functioning as surrogates for senses. I’m also thinking I’d like to put myself – or others – directly into the creative loop. Thinking biometrics or likes.

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A Real Poet Writing a Poem with AI

Published by bryantohara on June 9, 2024

This is a somewhat real-time deep dive into one of the ways I use generative AI (in this case ChatGPT4) to develop a poem, along with my views on doing so.

Apologies in advance for the clickbait-y title.

After searching YouTube for videos on the topic, I wound up being more than a little disappointed. All I found were either rants about “AI will ruin poetry” or demos of “look at how cool this is with only a prompt or two”.

I can do better than that, even with an admittedly less than perfect presentation.????

Be warned, this is a long one, folks, so buckle up.

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