Excerpts from Poet’s Note to the Editors:

When consumer AI first arrived, I watched the townspeople point in

terror. Instead of building torches, I started writing poems. It’s what I

always do when disaster is coming as if I believe that words can save

the world.

I challenged AI to write poems against me. Think Grandmaster chess

champions versus IBM. Only AI matched up against a third-rate poet

in this case. But it didn’t matter. It rhymed. It made predictable like

breaks. AI reminded me of Kenneth Koch’s poem My Olivetti Speaks.

It starts:

“Birds don’t sing, they explain. Only human beings sing. If half the

poets in the world stopped writing, there would still be the same

amount of poetry.

If ninety-nine percent of the poets in the world stopped writing poetry,

there would still be the same amount of poetry. Going beyond ninety-

nine percent might limit production.”

I did the equivalent of screaming at AI to write a poem. Without typing

in ALL CAPS, I entered commands like, “In the style of Kenneth

Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Ada Limon.” Don’t rhyme, I typed. Combine

humor with tragedy. Mix John Donne with Langston Hughes. Rewrite

a William Carlos Williams poem in the manner of Maya Angelou.

No matter how many prompts I tried, machine language didn’t

understand irony.

Visual AI fared better. I felt like Frank O’Hara at a cocktail party

pitting AbExers against each other. Inputs like de Kooning drawing

hands, Jackson Pollock burying bourbon in his backyard, or Rothko

talking to the shadows in his soul were enough to pound drinks and

typewriter keys at a manual in the corner but fell short of images like

my meditations on fame: Ernest Hemingway (once the most famous

person in the world) kissing Kim Kardashian (now the most famous

person in the world) was something to behold. The world is something

each of us takes our understanding of and works to reinvent it.

We reinvented writing and art and music by misunderstanding the

commands of time. I tried Mary Tyler Moore’s hat, throwing her into

the air, or Betsy Ross folding Bob Ross into a five-pointed star. Our

hieroglyphs are celebrities and famously misunderstood figures. Each

fable we rewrite and make into propaganda serves as a deeper warning:

Everyone is scared of Artificial Intelligence. But Artificial Intelligence

should be afraid of us.

I used these prompts to prompt myself without the help of AI. They

made the pictures. I made the words.