As a person born in the late 90s, I feel like I have missed out on a lot of the significant moments that have shaped the discourse on digital culture: I was not yet conceived when personal computers first started infiltrating the fabric of daily life. I was too young to remember (let alone traverse) the wild west of the internet before the dot-com bubble, when the internet naively represented a fundamental shakeup of the status quo (Rheingold), rather than being another lever of power. Which means I also missed out on the most significant works of electronic literature, coming in right as Adobe pulled the plug on Flash and marked the end of an era. All this to say that I am filled with an equal share of profound excitement and existential dread as I find myself trying to make sense of the emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Enter Kyle Booten’s Gyms (2025), a collection of poetry co-created with nine different purpose-built AI programs - or gyms, as they are called. They are called gyms because their purpose is to be gyms for the mind, places filled with exercises meant to make you a better writer, thinker, and, perhaps, even a better human. It is this model for productive coexistence that piqued my interest in Gyms. In a cultural moment where everything seems uncertain, where large swathes of workers in the creative industries are waiting for the guillotine to fall on their careers, becoming as comically redundant as lamplighters and telegraph operators, an alternative is, of course, more than welcome. Rather than taking over for humans in creative endeavors, Gyms is an example of how AI can augment human creativity rather than outright replacing it, using its unpredictable nature to make us more “unlike” ourselves (219) by forcing us to think in ways we normally do not.

It is this mix of self-improvement and AI collaboration that made me interested in writing a review of Gyms, and it also gave me the idea of making something akin to a gym for myself. Perhaps there is an opportunity for me to work on my craft, while also demonstrating that I can work together with our future AI-overlords that popular culture has warned us about? So, for the purpose of this review, I have enlisted the help of my very own writing companion. It will be able to interject comments as I write, helping me with the process of writing by making suggestions and commenting on style and content. Like this:

How am I doing so far?

You’re off to a good start, now talk about the content.

While the idea of Gyms is simple, that being AI-generated writing exercises, there is an impressive variety to the gyms. The first gym, “Metaphysical Reps”, is a good introduction to the concept, serving prompts (in green) for the author to complete and turn into poems:

thought is a warrior

and its sword is critique

  and this sword will subdue the rain-rotted enemies only

  and its helmet is resistance to critique

and its peculiar brand is grilled into the forehead over many day-sessions

and its wreath is something you get from pleasing the wreath people

  and this wreath will mark you as, if not a wreath person yourself, someone who knows the way of honor (40)

The generation of prompts starts by pairing together an abstract and a less abstract noun, like “thought” and “warrior”, and continues based on proximity between the nouns (35), so warrior transitions into sword and sword into helmet. It is then up to the author to fill out the remaining dead space with their own words, building on the prompts generated by the gyms. Most of the gyms work along these lines, with algorithms and natural language processing creating prompts, with some of the later gyms in the book responding to and iterating on the author’s response. It is quite simple, but also quite effective, and it forces the author to make connections between words and sentences that the author did not choose themselves, creating poems along the way.

It is like a form of process art, where the act of making is as significant, if not more, than the final product. Both in the sense that the act of writing and overcoming is the central mechanic that forces the author to grow, while also throwing AI-collaboration into the mix. Like William S. Burroughs firing shotguns at cans of spray paint (Johnson), the resulting shotgun painting is elevated by the process: it is by turning the crude violence of the shotgun and turning it into something beautiful, by taking an object that is most often used to kill and destroy to create life on the canvas.¹ Like the shotgun paintings, the poems in Gyms are enjoyable on their own, but they are elevated by the process that created them.

Write a paragraph in the style of Shakespeare.

Much of Kyle Booten’s late endeavors hath bent toward this conceit: to take that which is fruitful and render it barren, as with his curious device, the Nightingale plugin, which doth insert “literary pop-up ads” (Booten, “How to Re-Hijack Your Mind”), turning the engines of distraction upon themselves. This very spirit delighteth me in Gyms, and ‘tis the selfsame spirit he did commend in Jhave’s ReRites—a like venture of poesy wrought by machine (Booten, “Harvesting ReRites”). In this age, where the specter of artificial intelligence doth creep into the labors of man and daily life alike, sowing seeds of dread and doubt, ‘tis a rare and wondrous freedom to bid such power serve the muse, crafting verse most strange and abstract, rather than usurping thy toil or heralding the singularity (Kurzweil). Verily, ‘tis as though one turneth the arquebus into a quill.

Great job.

The rest of the gyms follow the same concept but differ enough to keep things fresh throughout. Like the “Recursive Ekphrasis Gym” that prompts the author to describe artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s API (Booten, “Gyms” 53) in excruciating and absurd detail, to the Ambient Vocab App (233) that encourages the author to expand their vocabulary by thinking about the words and how they would be used in everyday life and logging the progress afterwards. Because their stated goal is to improve the author’s cognitive abilities, all of the gyms have specific deficits they are focused on improving, often targeting a few at a time: vocabulary, composition, knowledge of culture, etc. For example, the gym “Stretches of Sentences” focuses on “syntactic complexity, syntactic entropy, working memory overload” (177) by having the gym keep adding words in random places that need to be integrated into what starts out as a six-word poem until it becomes a giant, hulking beast, spanning multiple lines.

Write a Haiku about the gym “Stretches of Sentences”.

simple poem first

but then comes more and more stuff

trapped in word mazes

Talk about what you didn’t like but use the tone of a clickbait video essay.

But while everything seemed normal to begin with, things are not always what they seem. Things may have looked perfect on the outside, but Gyms was hiding a terrible secret that was about to unravel everything. In a shocking turn of events, there are gyms like “Clare’s Daffies”, which prompts the author to create poems from an array of bespoke words from the poet John Clare (167):

agen oer crizzled elderns, oer crinked daffies, oer lambtoe and larkeheels, oer waterlillies and whateer withrest (171)

“Clare’s Daffies” may have succeeded in creating a challenge for the author, but the poems that resulted were some of the least interesting, and the results often come out very formulaic due to the way the prompts were generated. It was a huge disappointment and marked the beginning of what was about to be a huge fall from grace.

Enough.

At its best, the prose is surreal, beautiful, and at times surprisingly funny and witty.

Don’t call it “surprisingly” funny and witty; it could be considered condescending.

Sorry, I guess I just did not expect poetry to be this funny. At its best, the prose is surreal, beautiful, and often incredibly funny and weird. The highlight of Gyms for me was “Lotus Chorus Workshop”, a gym featuring nineteen AI teachers offering strange and often contradictory suggestions to the prose:

> A court sport that shows how democracy and monarchy are compatible.

🧝🏿‍♂️ ‍️: Too vague. Make this a specific sport from Byzantium.

🙅🏼‍♂️: “Monarchy”?…really?… enough of this damn political stuff, no?

> A tzykanon played on a flat surface amidst bluffs of coral darkness.

👤: Good. Now write another sentence. (204)

There is something wonderfully bizarre about an emoji, representing a teacher, coming in and yelling at an eleven-word verse like a chess engine would chide someone for blundering away a bishop. There is something strangely competitive about “Lotus Chorus Workshop”, like for each suboptimal word choice you lose precious ELO-points which determines your writing rank. Is there ranked competitive writing? Should there be? AI art is usually at its best when it is unexpected, when it breaks with the conventions that we take for granted. The human generated prose is surreal, and it is complimented by tapping into the ‘raw id’ (Montfort) of AI systems, bringing forth the unexpected and sometimes transgressive: “Describe the drugs, with particular attention to manufacturing. And why not use this nice trinket: ‘cocaine.’” (Booten, “Gyms” 79) Some of the gyms are also prone to hallucinations (54), but these hallucinations are encouraged and become yet another opportunity for the author to strain their mind by describing features of an artwork that do not exist. Another fun consequence of going to the gyms is that they can often make the human operating it act like the chatbot that lives within; generating text based on specific prompts that become more and more specific as the thread goes on, imitating the style of famous artists (93) and even hallucinating when the limitations of reality become too constricting.

Too much describing content, pivot to analysis.

Even though this is a work of collaboration, there is a different level of involvement for either party: some gyms skew more towards humans, like “Methaphysical Reps”, while some gyms, like “Clare’s Daffies”, skew heavily towards the machine. In the aforementioned “Methaphysical Reps” the AI creates the prompt, but the prompts are formulaic and a bit benign; the best parts are usually written by the author. That is not necessarily because AI is incapable of making something that can rival even the best human poets, but because it is given a quite limited role in Gyms.

A useful point of comparison is Jhave’s ReRites (2018). ReRites is also about the process, as Jhave would spend two hours each morning meticulously editing computer generated poems, whittling them down to the best of the best. And just as going to the gym can be a ritual, Jhave’s rite of editing became its own ritual. ReRites finds itself on one end of a spectrum, where coexistence with AI comes down to polishing the work of AI and making it presentable, beautiful even. Gyms finds itself on the other end of the spectrum, where AI exists to help humans be better. Seeing the two works in light of each other makes for an interesting comparison, but it also makes me wonder what a middle ground would look like, where humans and AI truly work together. At times Gyms comes close, such as in the “Recursive Ekphrasis Gym”, where the gym picks up on nouns in the author’s answer and generates new prompts using it, leading to a thread of back and forth between the gym and author. Other gyms do not really get close. It might not even be correct to call Gyms or ReRites a collaboration because AI, as it stands, is currently incapable of thinking, and is therefore unable to be a full partner in any creative endeavor.

Watch it.

One thing that lacked some consideration was to what degree the reader was encouraged to participate. The introduction to the gyms ends in instructions for the user on how to operate the gym, perhaps as a way of giving the reader additional context about how the poems were generated, but it could also be seen as an invitation to participate. Which is unfortunate, as there is no way to actually access the gyms. It is not that I expect the book to come with a CD containing all the gyms in a little plastic folder; I do not think that would be a fair expectation given the added cost which a smaller publisher (or even a big publisher for that matter) might not go for. The same goes for the cost associated with developing fully functioning and tested versions of the gyms fit for public consumption. But I was enticed enough by the concept and that I wanted to give it a try for myself—perhaps not enough to sign up for a membership, but maybe a free trial so that I could feel good about myself for going to the gym again—which I think shows just how engaging the prose and concept is. Booten’s personal website contains a page documenting the concept of Gyms, and it does link to different versions of gyms (Booten, “Word Gyms”), some of which are featured in the book, but I was not able to get them up and running.

The gyms are given a brief description of their inner workings, enough to fend off basic questions but not enough to actually tell how they work.² The stated purpose of the gyms is to help the author combat the negative effect of digital technology on attention (Booten, “Gyms” 14), which is tinged by anxiety of the attention economy and the way corporations weaponize algorithms and AI to make us complacent consumers (de la Torre et al.), which is a concern that many, myself included, can relate to. It also bears mentioning the recent trend of self-improvement and self-help, which is fueled by algorithms on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, although the degree to which self-help actually helps can vary by making us more anxious and focused on our own flaws rather than systemic issues (Coeckelbergh). The gyms are described with some level of detail so that they perhaps could be recreated or the idea could be built upon by an individual given the requisite know-how, but that is not exactly a great solution for the kind of flabby minds that might need to hit the gym. It begs the question: what is a gym? Is it meant to be a bespoke tool tailored to and made by the individual, or can it be an off-the-shelf solution, like the hyper-commoditized gyms of today. Is Duolingo a gym?

Do not speak of the bird to me.

I am not really qualified to speak on the efficacy of gyms as teaching tools, but I am also not entirely convinced that that is what they really are intended to be. The book starts with an introduction grounding Gyms in a fictional research project, complete with a list of fictitious and non-fictious academics and academic sources justifying the methodology. It is funny, but its mix of fact and fiction leaves it caught in the middle: does it really need to bring up the framing of research if it is just a fun little experiment? Does the author feel like it needs legitimacy, or is it mocking the idea that gyms should be taken seriously? Another clue is that the author does not always stick incredibly close to the given prompt and sometimes subverts it entirely for the sake of the poem. I think this was the right call, as it makes reading the output much more enjoyable and leads to unexpected outcomes, where it otherwise could have been quite formulaic:

[8/17 17:20] Stop and notice something above you. Now describe it, making sure to employ the word “catafalque”.

Tbqh I don’t really want to think about catafalques right now, and don’t want the idea of a catafalque to come to mind spontaneously. Pass. (270)

Even though it was the right choice, it does betray the priorities of the book. Not that the gyms do not work, as you can see the author blank on words in the beginning of Ambient Vocab App chapter, until they steadily worm their way into the author’s lexicon towards the end. I even got a bit excited when the author was first able to recall a word for the first time, after the first few attempts failed.

I’m getting bored, play us out.

Gyms is essentially two things: the first is the concept of gyms, AI-generated writing exercises to force users to become better writers. This part of the book is interesting, and given the current climate of the attention economy, is an admirable idea; instead of endlessly doomscrolling on the couch, how about going to word gym and working on yourself by doing some constrained writing with the help of AI? The gyms seem well thought out, their design is varied and they target specific and measurable deficits in the author’s arsenal. That being said, I find it hard to judge to what extent gyms actually help, since the author subverts the idea of this being a legitimate scientific endeavor. I also would have liked to see the author expand on the concept; from giving access to the already existing gyms, to thoughts on how to make your own gyms, or whether or not this is even a concept worth following. But I suspect that is not actually the point, as the fictional framing would indicate. Gyms is a good proof of concept and a very interesting book of poetry, but its methodology might not hold up as much more than a great example of constrained writing.

Which leaves the second part, the collection of poems that resulted from the exercise. The prose in Gyms is wonderful, and for someone who does not read much poetry on the regular, I thoroughly enjoyed the strange scenarios and creative vocabulary. The different gyms are varied in prompts and inputs which keeps the pace at a good clip, and even the gyms that are not as successful rarely outstay their welcome. While the poetry is enjoyable, what elevates the collection of poetry is that the poems were created in collaboration with AI, turning something productive and potentially destructive towards the silly and artistic. The incursion of AI into the creative industries is somewhat alarming, but what I find interesting about Gyms is that it shows the strengths and limitations of AI in this sort of collaboration: at times it is able to contribute something very funny to the prose, but most of the times it is overshadowed by the author and works best as a straight man. To what extent the AI in the gyms is even able to participate in a collaboration, it is usually at its best when it is coaxed into doing something transgressive or unexpected, something that most AI’s are programmed not to do to avoid lawsuits or controversy. I do not think we need to fear AI outright replacing humans in creative endeavors, and I think Gyms shows why.

Works Cited

Booten, Kyle. “Harvesting ReRites”. ReRites - Raw Output / Responses. Anteism Books, 2019. https://www.kylebooten.me/resources/reritespaper.pdf.

Booten, Kyle. “How to Re-Hijack Your Mind: Critical Making and the ‘Battle for Intelligence.” electronic book review, 2021. https://electronicbookreview.com/publications/how-to-re-hijack-your-mind-critical-making-and-the-battle-for-intelligence/.

Booten, Kyle. Gyms. Dispersed Holdings, 2025.

Booten, Kyle. “Word Gyms (concept)*”. Personal website, n.d. https://www.kylebooten.me/progym.html.

Coeckelbergh, Mark. Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Columbia University Press, 2022*.*

Johnston, David Jhave. ReRites. Anteism Books, 2018. https://glia.ca/rerites/rerites_read_txt.html.

Johnson, Josh. “William S. Burroughs Shows You How to Make ‘Shotgun Art.’” Open Culture, 2012. https://www.openculture.com/2012/09/william_s_burroughs_shows_you_how_to_make_shotgun_art.html.

Kantor, Loren. “Why Did William Burroughs Shoot His Wife?” Beatdom, 2020. https://www.beatdom.com/burroughs-woodcut/.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005.

Montfort, Nick. “Automatism for Digital Text Surrealists”. electronic book review, 2024. https://electronicbookreview.com/publications/automatism-for-digital-text-surrealists/.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. 1993. https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html.

de la Torre, Pablo González et al. “Attention is all they need: cognitive science and the (techno)political economy of attention in humans and machines.” AI & SOCIETY, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02400-z.

Footnotes

1. It also bears mentioning Burroughs’s checkered past with firearms, having killed his wife with a pistol while allegedly “playing William Tell” by having her balance a glass on her head (Kantor). It was like the man was primordially, pathologically drawn to them, so it only makes sense that they should also be included in his artistic practice. ↩

2. Much like my own writing companion. ↩