Please use AI for this

I slid down an AI rabbit hole yesterday, lured, ironically, by a poem.

Please Use AI, posted on Instagram by @thepoetjoanna, first caught my eye. I love her lush descriptions of how genuine humanity transcends artificial intelligence.

“Please use AI when your mother dies,” she wrote in the first stanza. “Ask it what grief feels like. Let it explain bereavement in 12 clear bullet points. Do not spend years finding her in the supermarket by the tomatoes she always bought, in the smell of the rain on warm pavement, discovering new ways to miss her.”

She based her poem on one of the same title by writer Shawn Smucker. So, I found that one too. Smucker’s poem also celebrates the perfection of our fallibility and how the teetering totter of that truth informs the best parts of our lives.

Inspired, I decided to add my own poem to the mix. I hope you will too, because, while AI has a place in a world that changes faster than a zeptosecond, it shouldn’t eclipse the delightful quirks of our humanity.

We might be able to let AI feed us words, but we shouldn’t let it steal our voice.

With that in mind (and presuming you’ve followed the links to those other two poems), here’s my version:

Please Use AI

Please use AI to tell you how to hug, so your nose won’t bonk your very tall son’s chest as you greet each other at the airport when he comes home. You won’t smile to yourself, then, in the months between those visits, when you touch the tip of your nose and remember how it felt smooshed up against his buffalo plaid jacket.

Send a Waymo to your mom when she asks you for a ride. That way you won’t have to listen to the intriguing stories of her childhood, like the one she told you Tuesday about her cousin Marilyn, whose gorgeous wedding impressed everyone, but whose marriage lasted less than a night. “Less than a night?” you say, incredulous. “She just came home,” your mom will reply. “And no one ever talked about it again.”

Ask Claude to plan your family trip to Ireland. Then you won’t wander into Mam’s bakery on the coast of the River Moy, chat with owner Jean Hanifin, eat her warm scones, and hear how she named her little restaurant after her mom.

ChatGPT can help you find the perfect spot to reel in a bunch of bluegills. If you get there quickly you can avoid whiling hours away in an old fishing boat with your funny friend Lee on a slow summer morning.

I guess the point is that efficiency is nice, accuracy important and guided tours through the World Wide Web can be very helpful. But, not at the expense of our humanity. Some of our greatest triumphs spring from the trauma of our imperfections.

The muck we slough through becomes the clay that makes us uniquely strong.

While I appreciate Artificial Intelligence, I celebrate the human brain.

I’d love to hear your poem.