Pietari Willey

Pietari Willey is a musician and cello teacher living in Kuhmo. During his studies Pietari also studied composing in Helsinki and London, which included familiarizing with the connection between written word, music, and rhythmic structures. Some of Pietari’s favourite poets include Eino Leino, Uuno Kailas, and Robert Frost. For this entry, Pietari wanted to explore possibilities of using artificial intelligence in formulating a poem, exploring how ChatGPT handles various prompts and metres. ChatGPT was used to create a starting point, which was heavily edited into the final competition entry. Kalevala re-imagined presents a story from the Finnish national epic with a modern twist. Two characters face off in a rap / slam poetry battle. The original epic did have a shamanistic battle with spells, but perhaps as a commentary about the limitations and reliability of modern technology, the characters facing off are somewhat different than in the original epic.