Public workshops

COURSE SYNOPSIS

This course, run by poet and data scientist Joses Ho, will empower participants to explore and harness large language models on their own for artistic and poetic purposes. This course will allow people with no experience writing poetry or code to get direct hands-on experience in running and manipulating LLMs for artistic and poetic text generation. Experienced poets will gain additional technical skills in exploring LLMs, and those with coding experience will be inspired to use their technical knowledge towards creative and artistic ends. Participants will gain a critical understanding of how LLMs work under the hood, and also begin to appreciate how poetry uses language as a medium to create emotional responses in readers.

This course comprises 1 session, with the following segments:

Introduction (1hr)
What is poetry? What is generative poetry? What are LLMs?

Getting to know the Tools (1.5hrs)
Technical session on preparing laptops for running LLMs locally. They will be led to reflect on the tradeoffs involved in running these models locally versus the popular method of relying on the cloud.

Basics of Text Generation (2hrs)
Having acquired sufficient technical know-how, we will look at the nitty- gritty of how LLMs actually produce long strings of text.

Writing Poetry with and Without LLMs (2hrs)
Participants will respond to various prompts on their own, with vanilla LLM settings, and with some LLM manipulation techniques. The poetry produced will be compared and commented on.

Sharing and Wrap-Up (1hr)
We will return to the questions we posed at the start, and think about the future of writing in the age of large language models.

This course is SkillsFuture Credit-eligible. All Singaporeans aged 25 and above can use their SkillsFuture Credits from the government to pay for a wide range of approved skills-related courses. You may visit the course listing on the MySkillsFuture website here to find out more.

For enquiries, please email bookawriter@singlitstation.com.

COURSE RUNS

Venue: Sing Lit Station, 22 Dickson Road #02-01, Singapore 209506

First Run
1 Nov 2025, 10am - 6pm

Second Run
12 Dec 2025, 10am - 6pm

COURSE FEES

Full Course Fee: $250
Student Concession: $150

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Joses Ho is a poet, pro-wrestler, and scientist. He leads a team that builds models to forecast infectious disease burdens, and curates real-time analytics and online dashboards for genomic surveillance of infectious diseases. As tech sorcerer for SingPoWriMo, he archives and visualizes the poetry posted. Joses also has interests in creative computing and generative text. His pamphlet Dogma was short-listed for the inaugural Paper Jam series in 2021, and his manuscript Moving Downwards in a Straight Line was selected for Manuscript Bootcamp (organised by Sing Lit Station) in 2019. His fiction has appeared in the Nature Futures 2 anthology and LabLit.com. He is also a pro-wrestler and ring announcer with GrappleMax.