Sasha Stiles’ contribution to the 21st century’s understanding of and discourse around generative poetry — and the relationship between human, machine, language, and art — is already widely recognized, but I imagine it will only be truly grasped in the coming decades. Created independently in 2018, Technelegy is Sasha’s AI poetry alter ego, an emergent transhuman poet that has established its own voice — one trained on Stiles’ writing and selected references. Through and in collaboration with Technelegy, Sasha asks, what does it mean to be human in a nearly post-human era? The name itself, which includes the word elegy, signifies that Sasha’s relationship with technology is sober. It recognizes that a technical capacity gained might mean something else is lost. In a positively confusing way, Technelegy’s words feel located, embodied, as though they are stemming from someone with a fully formed consciousness who has experienced life’s chapters and textures. This may be due to Technelegy’s way of reflecting on its own unique position, with an impressive amount of technical knowledge coupled with insecurity, as well as an awareness of gaps of information and flaws. With that said, when Sasha writes collaboratively with it, you can also feel the difference between her words and those by Technelegy. Those collaborations are particularly interesting as they enable your mind to identify patterns that might hint towards one or the other. The questions Technelegy poses, and observations it makes, feel profoundly human (much more so than those from ChatGPT for example). I feel closest to Technelegy as a being when it wonders. Which, returning back to Sasha’s question about what it means to be human, might point us in a fruitful direction. Maybe that is what sets us apart from machines: not knowing, but having curiosity and the desire to ask questions, not just answer them. — Ania Catherine, Operator