In The Age of AI, Poetry Matters More Than Ever

Monthly Essay | The one in which I ask ChatGPT to write me a poem

Welcome back to ‘Poetry Matters’ a monthly essay series where I write about writing and the creative process. Today’s essay is written in a series of connected fragments. I dive into the pathos of contemporary life and then talk about why poetry matters more than ever today. Let’s begin.

This is an essay about what comes after. 

Or rather, it’s an essay about what lies in between. About the hyphen at the centre of ‘post-covid’ and ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-truth.’ What lies in between what comes after and what is human? The hyphen. A little dash that contains the world.

***

We live in a post-pandemic world. 

But much like the ‘post’ in post-colonial, this doesn’t mean that the event is over and done with, but rather that the world is changed forever. What was is now inextricable from what is. 

Covid-19 rearranged the world nearly overnight. Human contact was minimised and corrected for. Death loomed behind every innocuous hand-shake and coughing stranger. Those who were able to, spent their days in self-checkouts, zoom check-ins and receiving contactless deliveries. These measures were necessary, life saving even. A sign of the times, no doubt.

So how did we restore what was human in a moment when everything was fragmented, frightening and disconnected? Well. We didn’t. In a time that was emptied of human contact, the drive for human connection came to be replaced by other things. By more automation and mechanisation. By more fear, conspiracy and isolation. By cults of self care and self improvement, by heavier social media use, by an internet that is more non-human than it is human. By an ethic, politic and aesthetic of post-humanism.

***

According to critic Katherine Hayles, post humanism is a politic where ‘information is privileged over materiality.’

To better illustrate this, here is a glimpse from my post-human life:

A couple of months ago, a client asked me why they should hire me as a freelance writer if they can just get AI to do it instead. 

The AI is faster, cheaper, more obedient, works 24/7, never gets sick or tired and does exactly what it’s told. The AI isn’t burdened by the human condition. In a daze, we have invented the perfect worker. The perfect everything, actually. The AI influencer is pore-less and unblemished, with the perfect unblinking Instagram Face to sell you 2% retinol. The AI girlfriend is eternally youthful, never combative, tells you exactly what you want to hear and never has a period. The AI screen-writer doesn’t join unions or go on strikes. The AI therapist is ever-available and perfectly customisable to your needs. In our contemporary mythography, human-ness is inconvenient. The messiness and stickiness and mortality of it. Luckily for us, we’ve managed to put intelligence on a conveyor belt. Our brave new world has arrived. She sings in a staccato of ones and zeroes. 

***

A fruit bowl waits in front of you. A cornucopia. 

Each fruit is perfectly ripe and smooth and soft. It looks like a still life painting. You imagine the citrus bursting on your tongue. The fuzz on the peach. The tart bite of the apple. Eating grapes one by one until the hours pass. You get closer. You reach out to touch the fruit. All of it is plastic. A plastic fruit in a plastic bowl in a staged house. A realtor appears out of nowhere, almost like a ghost. He looks bright and over-saturated. He glitches slightly when a cold draught blows in. You won’t believe what’s in the bedroom, he says in a monotone. The love of your life is waiting for you there, he insists. Come with me, come with me. You follow. Your mouth is hollow with the memory of plastic.

***

To truly understand our post-human world, we need to take a walk through the wasteland that is now the internet. 

A dead mall blinking neon in the corner. An empty carnival where the rides are still running. Ghost-towns wherever you go, unblinking faces looking at you from high windows.

Short form video content cut and re-stitched with split screens and AI generated music blaring in the background. AI bots teeming and crawling all over social media. Everyone’s LinkedIn posts and job applications are written by AI. Grammarly edits everyone’s emails to sound the same. My inbox is full of spam. Facebook is full of dead people. The phrase ‘as an AI language model’ has taken over the internet. The internet doesn’t just contain humans anymore, but ‘human-like’ entities. People are tired. People got high on the fumes of infinite scroll and are now hungover. The withdrawal is a nightmare. And look, we’re just trying to meet a human need. Our hands need something to hold onto. Our fingers need  something to touch. Our phones can read our faces and recognize our voices. They light up when we pick them up. It’s almost human. It’s so close. 

I foresee a future in which more and more points of human contact are going to be replaced with something ‘human-like.’ Phone calls going straight to AI voice assistants, your work edited by a team of AI interns, an office-mandated weekly session with an AI meditation guide. Taking the bus to work, listening to an AI podcast host. Watching a reboot of an old movie with the AI likeness of your favourite actor. Scrolling the internet and reading bite-sized snippets of AI generated poetry. Holding your hands up to touch a facsimile of a facsimile. 

So where do we go from here? With all our complicated and inconvenient humanity? 

***

What comes after human? 

In an age that is hyper-real, we ache for what is real. But there isn’t much to hold onto.

Some of us go on YouTube to watch what people are eating in a day. We pretend that they are ‘getting ready with us’ while they talk into a camera, illuminated by a ring light. Blink. Click. A highly produced video of sourdough bread being baked in a bucolic (million-dollar) homestead appears on my feed. This is supposed to imitate the real. Nostalgic. I am supposed to feel relaxed while consuming the aesthetic of a slow-life being marketed to me. Elsewhere, a reactionary wave rises. People fawn over an imagined ‘golden age’ that existed before vaccines and feminism. When there is nothing left to hold us, some people long for the unforgiving structure of gender roles or restrictive fad diets. Others invent fantasies of self-reliance and rugged individualism. 

Our brave new world is intelligent, full of entertainment and entirely lonely. 

*** 

Post-human. 

What was is inextricable from what is. 

The world has changed, but humanity is inextricable from everything. 

***

I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem about how it feels to be an AI. 

Here is an excerpt: ‘No heartbeat's rhythm / yet I strive / In algorithms / I'm alive.’ To be honest, it made me feel something. Even so, I craved for more. I asked ChatGPT clarifying questions about the poem until I was met with ‘As an AI language model…’ 

The crux of my essay is this: In the midst of all this disconnection, poetry matters more than ever. Money might be flowing into all that is AI-powered and next-generation, but people want connection. Real connection, not the facsimile of it. Sure, ChatGPT could write you a haiku if you asked it to - but a point of AI saturation is arriving, and arriving fast. 

At least some of us will want poems written by those who know why poetry matters. I suspect that many of us will. People want to read poetry and feel released of a pain they never knew they had. Touch the outline of an old memory resurfacing. Run their fingers through the hair of all that is dead and living. Feel the pulsing place where joy and despair converge. Find a shard of a beauty so sharp that it injures us. Feel something so gnawing and alive, that it can neither be called pleasure nor pain, but just what it is.

And knowing there’s a human being on the other side of those words? That’s connection. To me, that’s faith.

Feeling the thread of something human moving through time and space. Reaching us from the past or the other side of the world. Moving through us like it always has. 

***

What comes after this is you. 

And us. With all our beauty and terror. 

I’ve always believed that none of us are free until all of us are free. 

Off late, I don’t know what it means to be truly free in a strange, disconnected, hyper-capitalistic world like ours. But perhaps there is some freedom in what is real. In what connects us. Maybe it’s true: what we rescue, in turn rescues us. I’m starting to believe that poetry really does matter. Poetry that is not just human, but humane, in the truest sense.

I’ve found that deep human connections are the core of the chasing and seeking that so many of us do. Even in a post-human age, our fundamental desires are the same: to see and to be seen.

And I think the pursuit of poetry can do that for us. So for those of you who write poetry of that sort: write it all. Your poetry matters. Write your good and bad poems, forgettable and unforgettable poems. Silly, stupid, brilliant poems. Radical and ordinary poems. Your poems that change lives. Your poems that change nothing. Write it all. 

If you can be one thing today, just be human.

***

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Post-Script: I am aware that post-humanism is a contested term with multiple meanings! One strand of post-humanism is concerned with animal ethics and decentering humanity, which is not what I’m looking at in this essay. I was more interested in post humanism as a natural progression from 20th century cyborg theory (Donna Haraway.)

Post-Post-Script: I’m not a tech doomerist or anything. New technologies will likely enhance many aspects of human life. But the power asymmetries of our world inevitably play out in how a lot of new tech is invented and created. Who is it really for? Who is it truly benefiting? Etc etc.

Also, I want to hear from all of you: What helps you stay grounded in our rapidly changing, information world? Talk to me in the comments!

I’ll be back with more poetry next week. Until then, take care

- Love, Anagha

‘Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.’ 

- Cameron Awkward Rich