PNR 287 – editorial (January-February 2026)
A friend challenged me: ‘Tell ChatGPT to write a poem in your style.’ I am so posthumous as a poet that I doubted ChatGPT had ingested and digested my gristles. But I asked it and, sure enough, in seconds it regurgitated – or gurgitated – a poem clearly using devices I favour, with my repetitions, my two caesura lines, my strained diction. The programme knew me. Or it knew about writing that it attached to a person with my name. What ChatGPT delivered was not quite parody, not quite poem. It was, however, recognisable; a casual acquaintance encountering it might have said, ‘He’s writing again, though repeating himself…’. I then told ChatGPT to write a 2,000-word introductory essay on the Roman poet Ennius, with footnotes. This it did, again plausibly, except the footnotes were all over the place. Students who use ChatGPT for essays are often snared on wayward footnotes… The programme is trying to repair this Achilles heel.
ChatGPT, at first, alarmed me. Working through the poetry and prose submissions that PN Review receives through its narrow ‘submission windows’ – over 900 in the rarely scheduled week – I wondered if any, or rather how many, were machine generated or assisted. The absence of handwriting, of Tipp-Ex, of crossings out, meant the only evidence I had to go on was the digital attachment without – despite the term digital – fingerprints.