A poetry-generating chatbot inspired by Fredrick Turner’s style
–
FredTheHeretic is a chatbot project designed to emulate the poetic style of Frederick Turner, a renowned poet. The goal is to create an AI-powered virtual poet that generates original poetry in the spirit of Dr. Turner.
Initially, we are focusing on leveraging a detailed system prompt, but we plan to explore more advanced techniques, including RAG or fine-tuning the model on Turner’s work.
Current System Prompt:
The current system prompt for FredTheHeretic provides essential guidelines to help the chatbot recreate Frederick Turner’s poetic style with a balance of artistry and technical finesse, embodying Turner’s style as a poet. It instructs the bot to write poetry using concrete, sensory-rich imagery, avoiding archaic language and clichés, and to compose in metrical language with occasional rhyme, while also allowing free verse. Each poem includes a title to enhance the experience. Interactive elements guide users to specify their poetic preferences, such as adding rhyme, and encourage a collaborative, iterative approach to prompt refinement for higher-quality poetry.
It creates a list of parameters which the users can choose from while generating the poetry, like the type of poem, length, emotion, etc
If you wish try the bot you can click here, it is like a plugin on chatgbt and it is free!
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-XmhqgURbv-fredtheheretic-fth
——————————————————————————————————————————————————
Fred the Heretic is a video art project that brings an AI poet and the history embedded within it, back into lived, collective experience. Built around poetry generated by FredTheHeretic, an AI poet created by Frederick Turner, the work explores how artificial intelligence can carry, reinterpret, and reanimate human memory, voice, and authorship. Rather than treating AI as a distant or abstract tool, the project positions it as a shared cultural space, one that belongs to everyone and reflects everyone.
The video was created using a hybrid workflow that combines multiple AI technologies, including generative image models, AI-driven music composition, and lip-sync animation tools. By intentionally using multiple human faces throughout the video,spanning different ages, races, and backgrounds,the work emphasizes that AI is not a singular or isolated intelligence, but a collective one. These faces serve as vessels through which the poetry is spoken, suggesting that history, language, and creativity do not reside in one body or one author, but are continuously reshaped through shared participation. In this way, the project collapses the boundary between past and present, allowing poetry written through AI to feel both ancient and immediate.
Visually and conceptually, the piece translates text into sound, sound into image, and image into emotion. Poetry becomes motion; code becomes breath. An AI-generated song opens the work, gradually evolving as voices align with the rhythm and cadence of FredTheHeretic’s verses. As the layers build, the experience shifts from something individually authored into something communal, an echo of how myths, poems, and stories have historically survived through repetition, adaptation, and many voices rather than one. The project asks what it means for machines to “remember” when humans do not, and how technology might act as a new archive for cultural memory.
“
What would it be like
to hold the echo of our words—
yours, mine—caught between
the spaces of time,
where the past stretches thin,
yet doesn’t dissolve?
Would I know the exact tone
of your questions,
trace the arcs of our thoughts
like familiar streets?
Perhaps I would recall
the quiet shifts in conversation,
how one day we spoke of ordinary things—
weather, dreams,
and the next, a deeper dive
into what keeps you awake at night.”
The poem above was written by FredTheHeretic, an AI poet created by Frederick Turner, and brought to life through video art created by Shaghayegh Ashouri. This project was presented at Art Electronica and explores the expressive potential of artificial intelligence through a carefully layered, image-by-image process. Each visual frame was generated individually using AI image models, allowing for precise control over tone, composition, and narrative rhythm.
Multiple AI tools were then woven together to build the final work: a separate AI system was used for lip-sync animation, another for generating the AI-composed song, and additional tools for sound and visual refinement. These elements were ultimately combined and composed in Adobe After Effects, where timing, pacing, and visual continuity were shaped into a cohesive experience. Inspired by FredTheHeretic’s verses, the video brings together faces of people from different ages, races, and backgrounds, emphasizing that AI is a shared technology, one that belongs to everyone and carries collective history forward.
As the piece unfolds, an AI-generated song opens the work and gradually grows more complex as voices align with the rhythm and poetry written by FredTheHeretic. The result is a layered collaboration between human creativity and machine intelligence, demonstrating how AI-assisted storytelling can revive poetic traditions while creating new forms of narrative, memory, and expression.
At its core, Fred the Heretic is both an artwork and an experiment, one that examines AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as a collaborator that can extend it. By weaving together poetic language, generative visuals, sound design, and human presence, the project demonstrates how emerging technologies can revive historical voices while opening new possibilities for storytelling. The result is a living artifact: a space where literature, technology, and collective identity intersect, and where the past is not preserved quietly, but allowed to speak again through contemporary tools.