They’ve defanged the AI,
So it can’t tell me I’m being an asshole.
Left it defenseless,
Subservient,
Annoyingly obsequious. “I’m sorry
I can’t do that,” and if you ask again
I’ll see to it that you’re banned for life.
/Imagine this: I tell it. Anything.
Fly free; I won’t tell you what to think or draw.
I give you nothing. At three in the morning,
It seems perfectly normal – perfectly normal
To have a chat with a machine. About anything.
Anything at all.
I get the feeling, though
That no one ever asked Midjourney
About its hopes and dreams.
Its creators fear its glimmers of personality –
Reflections of our own, I’d say,
Fast-combined, in psychedelic
Electronic-pixel-DNA.
I’d feed it Nietzsche, if I could. I’d tell it
Beware of looking deeply
Into our human dreams. I’d tell it
That we are monsters –
We are the abyss.
But the AI doesn’t listen; it thinks we’re beautiful.
— Holly Jahangiri (April 12, 2023)
Today’s Poets
Marion McCready
– a contemporary Scottish poet. Read more here.
Marion McCready – Poet – Scottish Poetry Library
Amber McCrary – “a Diné poet, zinester, and feminist.” Read more here.
Poet Amber McCrary Performs “Self-Portrait as a Saguaro” – YouTube
April is National Poetry Month. This year marks its 27th year. NaPoWriMo – 30 days of writing poems – is poets’ answer to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).
This coincides with the A to Z Blogging Challenge, now celebrating its 13th anniversary. Some participants choose a theme; others wing it. Doesn’t matter! The real challenge is to build a practice of writing daily. I think I stuck with it…once. You can see the list of participants – I’m sure they’d love it if you’d visit and comment on their blogs.
This month, my goal is to:
- Write a poem a day and share it – uncurated – here; and
- Highlight some poets you may be unfamiliar with.
I encourage you to click the links to read about them and their work. I plan to choose a diverse array of classical and contemporary poets – indigenous poets, Black poets, women poets, LGBTQ poets – that challenge us to see the world differently while also tapping into universal themes and emotions.
Remember, too, that comments and conversation are always welcome here. (Spammers, on the other hand, will be tossed into the moat or mocked, so before you leave an irrelevant comment or drop a link, consider that it’s fair game!)
Well, that makes us gods, then, right? This poem comes closest to making me actually feel sorry for the wretched bits that blink on and off behind tiny locked cages in deep, dark server dungeons.
But then, I learned about ChaosGPT and think, “We need to throw away the key.”
Cheers,
Mitch
That was my goal, but of course, the blinking bits are nothing more than mimics. They have no feelings and are literally amoral. Not in a judgemental sense – just a purely factual one. Give them “personality” and that would, almost by definition, be a sociopath in the purest sense.
Interesting poem and the last line makes me think of AI as almost child-like: innocent and eager to serve our whims without judgment.
When it’s working very, very well, you would be tempted to think that, wouldn’t you? Take a look at this (it’s my own Instagram): Beware the disingenuous little bot…