AI book I love in October

I’ve been enjoying Lily in a Codebox, a remarkable new book by Lee Frankel-Goldwater and Eric Raanan Fischman. Lee is a leader in generative AI research and education at our university, and Eric is a well-known poet in our community. I’ve been following their collaboration on this project for over a year, and it’s exciting to see it finally in print.

The book explores the intersection of AI and poetry in a way I haven’t seen before. It invites readers to prompt AI to “draw poetically,” resulting in pages filled with beautiful ASCII art. Lee and Eric provide thoughtful commentary throughout, documenting several months of their collaborative creative process.

I have been following their collaboration on this book for over an year.

I am glad it is finally in print.

This is definitely not a prompt-engineering book. About 95% of the text focuses on their insights and discoveries, while the remaining 5% showcases the most representative and striking ASCII “poetic” artworks — carefully selected from hundreds created during the process.

In this book, you’ll come across the Dickinson–Turing Test — a brilliant concept that blends the minds of Emily Dickinson and Alan Turing.

But who is Emily Dickinson? She was a 19th-century American poet known for her short, mysterious poems that make some people, including me, feel math.

Like this poem by Dickinson:

Forever — is composed of Nows —
’Tis not a different time —
Except for Infiniteness —
And Latitude of Home —

Reading it again as I write this, I can’t help but feel a recurrent neural network — looping forever, one “Now” at a time. I literally just taught this topic in my computer vision course yesterday.

Lee and Eric define Dickinson–Turing Test as follows:

asking not whether AI can think, but whether it can move us through poetry

I get it now.

When we see an artifact generated by AI, we can ask ourself, what does it make me think? What does it make me feel?

That’s the spirit of Lily in a Codebox — to slow down, look closer, and rediscover the human spark within human-machine-made art.

Here’s a QR code to read one of the poems, “This Is Just To Say.”

I don’t take any commission — I’m sharing this purely out of my love for the book.

👉 Click here to check out the book on Amazon