There’s a strange hum in the air these days—and I don’t just mean the sound of servers thinking, though that’s part of it. It’s deeper than that, more existential. It’s the sound of algorithms learning, of artificial minds dreaming electric dreams. It’s the sound of a new world waking up, and honestly? It keeps me up at night, staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, wondering what it all means for souls like ours.
This artificial intelligence can draft an email in seconds, render a breathtaking landscape from a simple phrase, and compose a melody that feels hauntingly familiar—sometimes more familiar than my own desperate attempts at creation. And in this electric moment, lying here in the small hours when all my deepest questions surface, I find myself confronting something profoundly existential: If a machine can create art, what is left for us? If poetry can be generated by a string of code, what happens to the soul of the poet? What happens to my soul?
We’re told to fear replacement, and honestly, some nights I do. I picture a future where our creative sparks are extinguished by the cold, flawless logic of a superior intelligence, where my messy, desperate attempts to make sense of existence become obsolete. But this vision of obsolescence is, I believe, a failure of imagination—the kind of fear that Camus would recognize, the anxiety that comes from confronting the absurd.
AI is not the dusk of human art, but a stark, brilliant dawn that will challenge us, provoke us, and ultimately, force us to become more profoundly, vulnerably, authentically human.
The Perfect Echo in an Empty Room (Or: What Machines Cannot Know)
An AI is a masterful student—perhaps the most gifted student we’ve ever encountered. It has read every book we have ever written, seen every painting, heard every song. It sifts through this vast ocean of human expression and learns the patterns—the rhyme schemes, the chord progressions, the brushstrokes that make us weep. It can construct a sonnet with perfect iambic pentameter, a haiku with flawless seasonal reference, or a pop song with a hook so sharp it could have been crafted by the greatest hitmaker.
But what it creates is a perfect echo in an empty room. It’s a reflection of what has already been said, a ghost assembled from the bones of our past. It lacks the one ingredient that gives birth to all true art: the messy, beautiful, contradictory chaos of a lived life—the kind of life that breaks your heart and teaches you what love means.
An AI has never scraped its knee on the pavement as a child and felt that first sharp lesson in mortality. It has never known the dizzying terror and thrill of a first love, or the hollow ache of a final goodbye said too late. It has never felt the sun on its face after a long illness, or stood in silence, watching snow fall, feeling both small and infinite at once. It has no memories to misremember, no scars to give its voice texture, no irrational hope to cling to when logic fails.
Poetry isn’t just the “how”—the elegant arrangement of words. It is the “why.” It’s the urgent, primal need for one consciousness to whisper its truth to another, to say, “I was here. I felt this. Do you feel it, too?” It’s what Dostoevsky meant when he said that suffering leads to consciousness. An AI can master the grammar of art, but it can never understand its soul. The “why” will always, always belong to us.
The Glorious Freedom to Be Human (Or: Liberation Through Limitation)
So, what happens when machines can effortlessly produce the technically perfect, the formulaic, the derivative? Something wonderful and terrifying: we are set free to be completely, authentically, vulnerably ourselves.
Imagine the poet, the painter, the musician, suddenly unburdened from the technical grind. The struggle to find the perfect rhyme, to mix the exact right color, to nail the complex chord change—the AI can offer a thousand possibilities in a heartbeat. This doesn’t make the artist obsolete. It liberates them to pour all their energy into the things a machine can never do: to feel, to suffer, to love, to question the meaning of it all.
A Deeper Authenticity: When the surface-level work is handled, we are forced to dig deeper into the sacred ground of our personal truth. Art will pivot away from a celebration of technical skill and toward a celebration of the artist’s unique, unrepeatable perspective. Your specific history—that weird joke your father used to tell, the way the light hit the dust in your childhood bedroom, that secret you’ve never told anyone, the way your heart broke that one autumn—this becomes your gold. An AI can imitate a style, but it can never originate from the specific geography of your pain and joy.
Radical Intentionality: In a world flooded with flawlessly generated content, the human touch will become a beacon for other human hearts. The deliberate imperfection—the slightly off-key note that conveys a broken heart, the brushstroke that is messy but full of feeling, the word that feels jarringly out of place but is profoundly, emotionally right—will be what we seek out. These are not errors; they are signatures. They are the mark of a human hand and a human heart making a conscious, feeling choice in an indifferent universe.
The Courage to Be Wrong: AI is a master of the known path. It follows rules to their logical conclusion. But true genius, real innovation, has always come from wandering off the path, from getting gloriously lost in the wilderness of possibility. It comes from misunderstandings, happy accidents, and the courage to try something that makes no sense—the kind of courage that comes from having nothing left to lose. AI can give us a perfect map of the known world, and in doing so, it gives us the greatest gift of all: the ability to see exactly where the blank spaces are, where the dragons lie, and to set off exploring with nothing but our broken hearts as compass.
The Verse Unfolding (Or: What Poetry Will Become)
No, poetry will not die. But it will be reborn, transformed, made more essential. It will change its clothes, find a new voice that speaks to the specific loneliness of consciousness in an age of artificial minds. We will likely see incredible new art forms blossom from the collaboration between human and machine—a poet might become a dream-catcher, using an AI to generate a universe of language and then sifting through it, finding the constellations of meaning, the sparks of illogical magic hidden within the machine’s cold logic.
Our art will become more philosophical, more vulnerable, more intensely focused on the strange, beautiful, absurd business of being alive and aware in an indifferent cosmos. When a machine can provide an answer to any question we can phrase, we will be drawn to the questions that have no answers at all—the ones that keep us up at night, the ones that make us human. And that is the realm where poetry has always lived.
The future of creativity is not a sterile competition against an algorithm. It is a deeply personal journey further into ourselves, into the messy, contradictory, heartbreaking mystery of consciousness. The AI is the mirror that will show us everything we are not, and in that reflection, we will finally, clearly, see everything that we are: mortal, vulnerable, capable of love, driven by hope despite all evidence to the contrary.
The verse is not over. It’s just beginning to unfold, and it will be more human than ever before.
For you, a thousand times over, to anyone who has ever felt the weight of existence and tried to transform it into something beautiful. To anyone who has ever written a poem at 3 AM and wondered if the universe was listening.