1) I asked 3 different AI agents to "write me an excellent poem about how it feels to be human". These were predictably terrible.
2) I alphabetized their responses as a whole, removing duplicate words, and used it as the vocabulary for a poem on same (I get to repeat/conjugate words as I please).
3) Here's the result. I think our jobs are safe but I am happy to be wrong:
What It’s Like
The trick of smallness is to stand up
to the stars, whose lungs map out a million rivers
overnight, whose frigid ribs dissolve before our words
can ever reach. A thousand thousand winters
stitching atoms in the cold gives you a bad back,
so they dream of summer’s palms
against their spines: if you doubt it,
place tomorrow in a cardboard box, heavy it
with river rocks and drown it until Tuesday
comes up bleeding on another system’s shore.
How’s that for a theory
of everything? While our skin
outlives its use, somehow these things
return: aching pulse, consciousness, syntax
and its awful jokes, architecture, firewood,
a cardboard box, an hour. Shores of singing
sentences predictable as loving you again, memory
and/or miracle—even, briefly, beauty.
The original AI poems:
ChatGPT
We wake as questions wearing skin,
breath stitching light into our lungs,
a fragile rhythm borrowed
from a universe that forgets nothing
and forgives everything slowly.
We build small meanings out of dust—
a name, a touch, a place to return to—
though every road dissolves behind us
like a thought we almost understood.
To be human is to reach anyway:
through doubt, through distance, through time,
to hold another fleeting heartbeat
and call it real
before it slips back into mystery.
- Gemini We are a strange and heavy architecture,
built of wet clay and staggering desire,
holding the universe in temporary fracture,
caught right between the bedrock and the fire.
To be a human is to carry clocks
inside a pulse that wants to live forever,
to build a fortress out of cardboard boxes
and map the stars while drowning in the river.
We gather grief like firewood for the winter,
we weave our grandest tapestries from pain,
and pull from tender palms the smallest splinter,
only to stand and love and bleed again.
We are the only beasts that weep at beauty,
who lose our sleep over a tomorrow we can't see,
tethered to flesh, to gravity, to duty,
yet desperate, wild, and aching to be free.
No map is true, no destination certain,
we stumble forward, fragile and sublime,
singing our syntax through a heavy curtain,
leaving our footprints on the shores of time.
-
Claude
What the Body Knows
You wake already mid-sentence,
a thought still finishing itself
from a dream you can't quite hold—
and this is the first miracle:
that consciousness returns at all,
that you are, again, someone.
To be human is to carry a weather system
behind the ribs, unpredictable,
sun breaking through an hour after
you'd given up on sun.
It's grief arriving without an appointment.
It's laughing so hard at a joke
you forget, for a second, that you'll die.
It's the strange arithmetic of memory—
how a smell can be a time machine,
how a song from a bad year
still knows your name.
It's loving people you can't fix
and being loved by people who can't fix you,
and calling that enough,
and meaning it.
It's the ten thousand small negotiations
between what you want
and what you'll actually do—
the alarm clock, the diet, the apology
you're still working up to.
It's standing in a kitchen at midnight
eating something cold from the fridge,
feeling, for no reason,
briefly and completely alive.
It's knowing you are a temporary arrangement
of borrowed atoms,
and getting a haircut anyway.
Buying the plant that outlives you.
Planning next summer.
This is the trick of it—
not transcending the smallness,
but finding it's enough:
a body, a few decades,
a handful of people who know your face,
one ordinary Tuesday
after another
after another,
somehow, a life.
I liked ChatGPT's best; it contained some insights decently well expressed. Gemini tried a little too hard with the rhymes, and I think they compromised its poem overall. Maybe it wasn't that great even without them. Claude's was a bit disconnected, which is OK, but fell a bit short of ChatGPT's for being a completed whole; it was taking some wild swings trying for "excellence," or just low-probability gates in AI terms.
Yours (@matsunosuperfan) was swinging for the far wall while constrained by word inventory. It had some jagged edges and mismatched juxtapositions - unexpected, maybe fresh, but I didn't like it quite as well as ChatGPT's.
What I found interesting is that only Claude used the you-and-your formulation while the other two began and proceeded with "we." Which is to say, Claude is (pseduo) aware that it's not human, looking at humanity from the outside, while the others feel or pretend to be part of the human race along with us, or at least express themselves (as it were) in that manner. Whether any of the three Pinocchios *wants* to be a real little boy, or thinks he's already one, is easy to overthink.
(7 hours ago)dukealien Wrote: I liked ChatGPT's best; it contained some insights decently well expressed. Gemini tried a little too hard with the rhymes, and I think they compromised its poem overall. Maybe it wasn't that great even without them. Claude's was a bit disconnected, which is OK, but fell a bit short of ChatGPT's for being a completed whole; it was taking some wild swings trying for "excellence," or just low-probability gates in AI terms.
Yours (@matsunosuperfan) was swinging for the far wall while constrained by word inventory. It had some jagged edges and mismatched juxtapositions - unexpected, maybe fresh, but I didn't like it quite as well as ChatGPT's.
What I found interesting is that only Claude used the you-and-your formulation while the other two began and proceeded with "we." Which is to say, Claude is (pseduo) aware that it's not human, looking at humanity from the outside, while the others feel or pretend to be part of the human race along with us, or at least express themselves (as it were) in that manner. Whether any of the three Pinocchios *wants* to be a real little boy, or thinks he's already one, is easy to overthink.
Thanks for reading <3 Surprised you find any of these palatable; I thought they were all hopelessly derivative and smarmy.
(6 hours ago)matsunosuperfan Wrote: Thanks for reading <3 Surprised you find any of these palatable; I thought they were all hopelessly derivative and smarmy.
Take a sip of wine between stanzas - it cuts grease, cleanses the palate wonderfully
