Les Wicks’ Time Taken

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in creative fields, including literary analysis. Here is a review of Les Wicks’ Time Taken, a new and selected book of poems published in 2025. The review is written and presented in the form of a podcast by artificial intelligence hosts.

I intentionally left the review unedited; my only intervention was to customize the tone to be adopted by the fictional hosts and to require them to quote extensively from the actual poems.

This experiment is published with permission of Les Wicks. This AI review contains several significant errors. Quotations are sometimes wrong, interpretations sometimes wrong, and the dialogue is annoyingly repetitive; but what do we expect? It’s made by a computer algorithm.

The process yields a linguistic analysis of a text’s themes, based simply on the words and phrases used in it. I’ve included some of this analysis in the notes to the video.

»» https://bit.ly/4f11STv

—Stephen J. Williams