“What the public seek in a Magazine,” Poe proposed in 1849, “is what they cannot elsewhere procure” (CL 2:793). What Poe had in mind was an alternative to the magazines of the day that often printed articles on moral enlightenment or social improvement. In rejecting their didactic instruction as literary heresy, Poe saw the opportunity to address the new reader who was emerging after the communications revolution of the 1830s. The sensationalism of the penny press, supported in its expansion by steam printing, the telegraph, and postal subsidies, had produced the near-universal literacy of white males. This new reader, typically young and not affluent, was less interested in traditional social and moral discussion in magazines, drawn more to diverting and amusing articles, and thus a perfect audience for Poe’s gifts and interests.Drawing aesthetic support from Coleridge’s principle that reading should provide pleasure rather than instruction, Poe applied his unusual combination of talents to create not one but two reading pleasures. His remarkable talent for exaggeration could be expressed in tales of adversity. His equally remarkable opposite talent for analysis could be expressed in literary criticism and textual elucidation. His twin talents produced both vicarious bodily pleasure in the stimulating accounts of adventures, improbable physical feats, and quirky professional achievements, and their opposite, the mental pleasures of close reading, textual analysis, and clever theorizing. One excitement soon led to popular culture; the other to the modern avant-garde.Today on the Internet both of these streams are flourishing: the social networks provide common pleasures, and generational artificial intelligence experiments yield elevated pleasures. Poe explored both forms of reading pleasure; his examples became important antecedents for both popular culture and the avant-garde, two very different modern developments.In Poe’s early theorizing, he posited an entire spectrum of literary utterance composed of only four elements: truth, romance, poetry, and music. His early “Letter to B—” containing these forms is worth rereading in full:Poe went further than regarding the pursuit of happiness in literature as the pursuit of pleasure. He denied any place for moral instruction, categorically rejecting it as “the heresy of the didactic” (eapoe.org). By eliminating the traditional literary center that focused on family concerns and cultural contexts, Poe opened the paths of two liberating effects. For the common reader his plots could provide entertainment and diversion as aims in themselves, while for the more sophisticated reader a focus on textual matters could provide its opposite, aesthetic pleasure for its own sake. Both streams, flowing in diametrically opposite directions, became possible after Poe separated literature from its traditional core of cultural and social meaning.Modern popular culture owes much to Poe, as is commonly recognized. He is often credited as the major predecessor of both the science fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. In fact, Conan Doyle once wrote, “Each [of Poe’s detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed. Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” (Wikipedia).The expanding coverage of the press of science and technology, all of it popular and some of it false, gave Poe substantial material for his fiction. The continuing communications revolution produced a rapidly expanding universe of knowledge and curiosity concerning fascinating new professions, such as Antarctic explorer, balloon navigator, mesmerist, astronomer, and chemist, each of which offered Poe new activities to investigate. Poe exploited the public interest in the exploration of the Antarctic (Symmes’s Hole), the American West, aerial travel by balloon, communication by telegraph, the unconscious as revealed by mesmerism, the chemistry of gold, and the latest discoveries in astronomy. The many recent advances in technology also gave Poe the opportunity for a bit of reverse satire in his “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” which humorously describes dozens of actual inventions. However, the language is of such flagrantly ornate hyperbole that each item seems improbable; afterward Poe teases the technologically uninitiated reader by clarifying everything in footnotes (eapoe.org). Poe’s “Balloon Hoax” takes another rhetorical approach, adding layers of realistic details that were intended to fool nearly everyone. Poe’s several hoaxes were merely entertaining, an early form perhaps of “fake news,” which recently has been used for political purposes (eapoe.org).Since authors in Poe’s day lacked international copyright protection, they often had to scramble to create income. Poe’s total earnings from writing were meager—Ostrom estimated they were only once above the poverty level (eapoe.org). The practice of reprinting articles with credit but without payment could make American authors celebrities when their works went viral through the press. Poe took special pride in his success in his matter, boasting to his friend F. W. Thomas, “‘The Raven’ has had a great run . . . but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did ‘The Gold-Bug’ . . . the bird beat the bug, though, all hollow” (PL 530–31).Poe followed the unprecedented success of “The Raven” with a work designed to exploit his celebrity, an account of how he purportedly planned, drafted, and completed “The Raven.” Poe’s logical explanation, following several decades of Romanticism, seemed to revive the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century. This unexpected combination gave the essay an air of literary engineering, in which Poe anticipated some of the attributes of the later literary avant-garde.In recent decades, a century and a half after “The Raven” went viral, Poe enjoyed an extensive presence on the Internet. For example, in our era of casual searching on phones, Google reports a total of 43.7 million Poe matches—compared to 13.7 million for Nathaniel Hawthorne and 10.4 million for Herman Melville. You can’t visit them all because your browser will probably quit after the first thousand or so. By the way, Google’s census of Poe matches lists these categories in order of popularity: stories, images, criticism by Poe, poems, tales, translations, science fiction, detective fiction, criticism of Poe, and hoaxes. On its general website Google treats the forms Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allen Poe (a common error), and Edgar A. Poe (his usual literary signature) as identical. However, on the Google Books website, it distinguishes them somewhat.Poe websites on Google are matched in number by Poe accounts on Facebook, which reports forty-four million current Poe-related accounts, the groups in order of popularity being EdgarAllanPoeAuthor, Poets Corner, Official Poe, Poe Book Collection, Poe Macabre, Evermore, Poe Lovers, Poe Fans, Buried Alive, Poe Room, Poe Book Club, and Poe the Master. Such popularity of course becomes an irresistible opportunity for parody: Russel Tarr gives instructions for making a “Fakebook” on classtools.net.Poe’s name and image are exploited on mass culture websites for shopping. Poe-branded merchandise on Google includes mints, busts, costumes, puppets, posters, black tea, canvas field bags, candles, wall clocks, greeting cards, Halloween props, rings, planters, perfume, hoodies, wig-and-mustache sets, soaps, top shoes, hand-painted Samuel Osgood portraits, and T-shirts, not necessarily in order of popularity. While the literati use Poe as a name to conjure with, some marketers use Poe as a name to sell with.Not taken seriously by most nineteenth-century Anglo-American critics, Poe nevertheless became a major influence in France after his works were translated and promoted by Charles Baudelaire. Poe’s ideas of literary invention had a major impact on the French symbolistes and through them on the modern avant-garde. Jonathan Elmer remarks, “Poe would take literary works to pieces like a defective mechanism (defective, that is, in relation to its avowed aims), noting carefully the faults in manufacture.” As a result, Elmer continues, Poe’s texts push “the human figure into the background”; he then quotes Theodor Adorno’s remark that Poe was “truly a beacon for Baudelaire and all modernity,” linking the two as “heralds of modernism who were also the first technocrats of art” (scholarworks.iu.edu).In time Poe played the cultural role in France of épater le bourgeois—to shock the complacent reader. Thanks to Baudelaire, Poe became for French writers and painters a poète maudit, a hero and outcast. For Poe imagination was not inspiration, as the Romanticists believed, but rather a sort of literary manufacturing process in which existing literary elements could be combined in new ways, using a more active form of the fancy that hitherto had been seen as limited to its powers of association. “The fairest field for the display of imagination,” Poe argued in “The Domain of Arnheim,” is “in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty; the elements to enter into combination” (eapoe.org).The most effective voice in the modern rehabilitation of Poe’s reputation is T. S. Eliot’s essay “From Poe to Valéry,” which relocates his mid-nineteenth century aesthetic development in a twentieth-century context. For Eliot, Poe was a displaced European, possessing the remarkable ability to produce poetic incantation, creating sound that had an independent and immediate effect on the reader. When Poe’s poetry approached the condition of music, as Eliot remarked, his ideas suffered, becoming momentarily entertained rather than fully believed. Similarly, in our contemporary political discourse, ideas are often brought up for a powerful immediate effect but never fully developed afterward.Eliot traced Poe’s influence in France on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Valéry. Later the impact was felt through them on the modernism of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Eliot himself. In works such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos, the use of language sometimes approaches the pleasure of la poesie pure, the state of pure poetry in which language is freed from any social and moral context. This is a contemporary result of Poe’s categorical rejection of all he abhorred in “the heresy of the didactic.” In Poe’s aesthetic scheme, the absolute opposite of truth is music. Thus, Poe’s incantatory sound can remove all literal meaning from poetry. For example, the remarkable sound and near-supernatural imagery of “Ulalume” makes its context seem almost intangible. As Eliot points out, in Poe’s very memorable phrase “my most immemorial year,” the word immemorial is entirely incantatory, its overwhelming sound contradicting its literal meaning. The example supports Eliot’s remark that “a poem does not say something—it is something” (Hudson Review [Autumn 1949], 337). On February 6, 1845, soon after the publication of “The Raven,” Charles Frederick Briggs, who had hired Poe as the founder and editor of the Broadway Journal, praised the poem as “framed according to his notions of poetry. . . . A mere beautiful something entirely free from didacticism” (PL 499). However, a few months later, while breaking up with Poe, Briggs rejected his work: “I think a machine, something like Babbage’s[,] might be constructed to write poetry and criticisms like his” (P 4:xxi). Babbage’s calculating machine is an ancestor of the modern computer, which now can not only work with images and texts but also produce them through generative artificial intelligence. The first program of this type to shock public attention in 2022 was the text generator of openai.com, DALL·E 2—its name combining the Pixar robot WALL-E and the surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Then the controversial ChatGPT text generation program appeared (chatbot.com), supported by a database of twelve billion parameters that had been compiled in 2021. Almost immediately students and professors realized the program could be used to create effortless texts for class assignments. Visibly alarmed, some schools quickly banned or strictly limited its use. One enterprising programmer offered software said to detect the use of DALL·E 2 software. By early 2023, a storm of new applications of generative AI programs had arrived to create texts and images and also to detect and manage their use. Microsoft made a huge investment in openai.com to add text generation features to its Edge browser and other programs across its line of software.The excitement over generative AI such as ChatGPT followed the realization of its virtually endless uses in education, mental health treatment, text translation, data summarization, journalism, and financial investment. ChatGPT, it was said, can even “write poems, tell jokes (often terrible), get philosophical, and debate political issues” (Slate, December 2, 2022).Generative artificial intelligence uses one of three different methods: rules, statistics, or neural networks. Rule-based systems produce the simplest results, using predefined parameters to shape the structure and content of a new text. Statistical models have the advantage of analyzing large databases of text data to find patterns that can be used in generating new text, a method more varied and more convincing than rule-based systems but still somewhat limited. Neural network–based models, the most advanced of the three, attempt to follow the structure and function of the human brain to generate more complex and convincing text.The press was quickly filled with discussions of issues surrounding the use of ChatGPT in the classroom, including counterstrategies, such as the use of oral and handwritten assignments and exams. We may ask, to what extent are programs that are now being asked to detect plagiarism themselves already a form of plagiarism? In recent years Google, Facebook, and others tried similar generative AI programs, only to withdraw them when they produced unacceptable contents. In the near future, we must ask, will similar applications of AI prove to be a boon or a bust? For current news in this rapidly evolving field, see voicebot.ai.In conclusion, at the end of 2022, Quora, a free question and answer site, launched a software program (it is available only by invitation) that was designed to interact with ChatGPT, multiple AI agents, and large data models. Quora’s concern was that convincing but untrue crowdsourced answers were being circulated. In addition, without editing the outputs of AI, chatbots might contain and circulate racist, biased, or other toxic content. Moreover, some chatbots were accused of regurgitating the very data that had been used in their training. In a class-action suit, Microsoft, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI were accused of copyright violations (TechCrunch, December 21, 2022). Readers of this column will be pleased to know that Quora picked the unwieldy name Platform for Open Exploration for its generative AI program, as an excuse to create the acronym POE.Poe in Cyberspace columns are archived at eapoe.info. The site also contains the second edition of “A Poe Webliography: Edgar Allan Poe on the Internet.”