Yesterday, I attended the MIX Conference, this year themed Writing With Technologies. Since first going in 2019, the team have been continually building a lovely, biannual, well organised event with really interesting presentations, excellent conversations, and delicious food. Sadly a technical glitch in the room during my panel meant I was unable to show the film finale to my own presentation. So I share it here so that those who are interested may reach the conclusion. Scroll to the end for the clips ... but the text and slides are also included below for those that weren't in the room.
Earlier this year, I made a poetry film inspired by the history of a Reading landmark — a Gothic military Keep. The finished film was projected onto its inner walls.
A building of precise military discipline became a context for something fluid, and evocative of lives lived. At the end [of this post] I’ll share an extract. But when I do, I’ll be playing a game: Truth and lies.
Truth from the human-researched film — and lies that were created especially for this presentation via AI-research... I recently experienced Helen Chadwick’s Carcass. Rotting food waste, transforming into compost. 
The context and the plinth signify: this is art. The institution underlines the work’s credibility and authenticity. The materiality is upfront, and truth is not at issue. As a filmmaker, my raw material is language, images, sounds, history. I compost (or collage) new forms from distinct but less physical matter. Truth and credibility in film may not be as clear cut as in Carcass.
Creatives have long reshaped truth though. I love that play between fact and fiction in drama and literature. TV like Rogue Heroes. Or fictionalised biographies. As artists, we always filter. We interpret. 
The poetry film, as a form, allows for slippage — between documentary, fiction, memory, and myth.
It’s not news, but it may use news. It’s not history, but it may appear historical. That ambiguity is part of its power — but also part of its ethical complexity. I think we absolutely can mess with the truth, as long as, as artists, we know firm ground beneath. 
The text in my film was made through erasure poetry. Words lifted from historic news — and pared back. Within that framework, there’s interpretation. What remains is emotionally evocative, symbolically charged. But there is omission — and omission, as we know, can itself be a form of lying.
But here’s a further twist: for once, I didn’t research the original sources myself. The information was delivered by a trusted collaborator — a respected journalist and published historian. Nevertheless, this choice made me question … What are the dangers when research is delegated? Particularly now there is AI scattered into the compost mix. Between the headline issues of training AI through copyrighted literature, and AI robot created paintings and artworks, and even if it’s not used to create the work itself, AI can significantly support or contaminate the research stages of human creativity. In using AI tools to delegate research, we may easily fabricate sources — possibly without even realising it. I asked ChatGPT for historical articles. It confidently described papers that don’t exist. The list wasn’t flagged as fictional. And along with AI hallucination, a further concern is AI model collapse, whereby generations of AI are trained on synthetic information and so becomes even less reliable. 
Just recently, the Chicago Sun-Times published an AI-generated summer reading list --
with glowing reviews for novels that have never been written. When a lie is well-dressed, it’s easy to carry it into our work without scrutiny. We laugh at the blunders and think we’d know better. But digital replication is frictionless. If trained editors can be fooled, so can artists — especially when we’re working fast, working solo, or assuming the machine has done its homework. 
So why use AI for research at all? Here’s one significant reason: access. Many artists — especially those working outside academic institutions — may be driven to AI, consciously or accidentally.
Poetry film is dangerous — in the best and worst of ways. It can take risks, It can live between genres — use found footage, documentary photographs, factual inspiration — but without declaring its sources. Poetry films don’t have to be truthful. They’re not likely to be fact-checked. You can’t run one through an essay-check software. It carries trust in its tone, its feeling, its presentation. But, when poetry films gesture toward fact — toward history or journalism — the maker has ethical responsibilities. Trust has to rest with the artist and their process, and they need to be confident of their sources and their truth before they start to creatively mess with it. I’ll leave you with that game: Which of these clips are based on genuine historical research -- and which are AI-assisted fiction? How can you tell? And would you if I hadn’t mentioned it? And if you would like to watch the full (true) film ...
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