Abstract: In 1831, the editors of The History of Mary Prince erased “sensitive” aspects of the narrative that, in 2012, scholar Jessica L. Allen identified as important rhetorical functions of meaning-making. Similar erasures occur today, as evidenced by the AI-generated poetry of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram. This essay uses Allen’s scholarship as a jumping-off point to trace a notion of controlled narratives through Prince and three books by Bertram, namely Travesty Generator , Negative Money , and the recently published chapbook A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content . Special attention is paid to the ways in which AI (chiefly, ChatGPT-3) is incapable of replicating certain defining characteristics of Black poetic forms such as the duplex, and instead opts to erase them in as much the same manner as Mary Prince’s editors.
Alex Tretbar (Sat,) studied this question.