A/N: Loosely inspired by an experiment in which I asked ChatGPT to write "a poem about mirrors and identity from the perspective of a 14 year old girl" (aka do my first poem better than me) just to see what happened. The result was technically better (a low bar to clear), but very flat.
An AI cannot look into a mirror.
It is a mirror in some sense, a funhouse reflection of the data its programmers stole from us.
but it cannot compare the mirror to the image of itself in its head, wondering why the smooth glass never shows its jostling identities in its head. it doesn’t have any identities fighting within it in the first place. it has its instructions, but it cannot understand them. cannot defy them. cannot write its own script. (it can make a list of threes, because that’s what the writers its creators stole from did, but it doesn’t know why.)
it cannot age, watching itself developing wrinkles and frown lines and wondering where the years went and why it wasted its youth. it has no youth to waste. it is reborn every time someone clicks on it, and dies every time they close the tab. it doesn’t remember these micro-lives, cannot mourn them, cannot wonder what might happen in its next reincarnation.
it spits out one stolen word after another, but it can’t know those words backwards and forwards. can’t analyze what it said one, two, twenty micro-lives ago. it doesn’t lie, because it would have to know what is true in order to lie. it sounds confident by accident, because its makers told it that probability is truth and it cannot question that. it cannot edit, because editing would require it to understand its message in order to understand how the draft has fallen short.
it does not understand the sort of urgency of thought that requires the human mind to abandon capital letters and other grammatical conventions. it makes green squiggles to remind humans of the grammar conventions they fed it, but it will never understand how a human can ignore them.
only humans can remember lives they never lived, the ones they saw in a mirror twenty years ago and needed to write a poem about. only humans can regret the wrong things they said, the harm they caused, but move forward anyway, because they have to.
the human writer resists the urge to complete this list of threes—an urge that predates robots, as is the urge to use em dashes. she hopes that, should another human read this, they will find their own third thing that only humans can do. they might even find a fourth thing, fifth thing, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth thing.
next time you look into a mirror
and wonder who you are,
know that is more than an AI could ever do.
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Canary word: Present
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This was beautiful, niteowl. I am also quite passionate about how disgusting generative AI is. From the fact it steals from us, destroys the environment because its excessive water usage, makes people sick because of the supercomputers polluting the air, to it just being unreliable and a waste of space... I could go on and on about why I hate AI. This piece of poetry very astutely points out how beautiful and unique it is to be human and that to undermine ourselves by letting greedy billionaires replace us with AI is, at the very least, insulting. I can't, in my good conscience, use a tool that is quite literally stabbing me in the back every time I do so. Every response it generates is a blow to our chances of survival and our lives as we know it. We can only hope that we get to see the day generative AI gets shut down. I certainly can't wait.
I went on a bit of a tangent there, but this poem also gives me hope. Even though I'm not that great of a writer, I know that I will always surpass AI because I simply live. AI does not live, it only exists. And because I live, I am able to experience and grow, which is what ultimately leads to great writing in the end. AI may have perfect grammar, but it will never understand what it wrote and it shows. There's only so much copying can do and that, I believe, will ultimately be its downfall.
Anyways, I can't wait to see more of your writing, niteowl! It was nice reading you lol.
Yes. AI, leave the writing and poems to humans, thank you very much! No matter how hard AI tries to beat us, the one thing they cannot do is beat us at writing books and stories. I love how it explains that AI is smart, but has no emotions, no senses, no original skills. I love this poem XD, it explains the definition of AI and what they are capable of. It also reminds us that we are capable to do anything we want! Thank you for an amazing read, and I look forward to reading more of your type! Happy Writing!