The other day, lugging my typewriter and hunched over my notebook while trying to be still and quiet to listen to my heart so I could write poems during my Live Poetry Pop-Up, I asked them what their 3-word prompts were for their poem and they asked, "Are you going to use ChatGPT?"
I hadn't felt so offended in SO LONG.
ChatGPT has ruined the word "prompts" for me!
Anyway, I wrote several poems that day but this was my favourite.
Perhaps because I needed to hear this.
Perhaps because this is one of my favourite verses from the Quran:
"Not a leaf falls without His knowledge, nor is there a single grain in the darkness of earth, or anything, fresh or withered, that is not written in a Record clear." [6:59]
Prompts: Heart | Hope | Faith
There is something so different about writing poems for my own self-expression, and writing a poem for someone based on their prompts.
Its not woo woo when I say that the state of the person requesting the poem has an effect on the eventual poem I compose, especially when we are in person.
Yesterday I wrote a poem for a friend and it had the line "the material is not more real than the spiritual".
I'm not worried about ChatGPT (even if I'm annoyed at it haha). My intelligence - mental, emotional, spiritual - is real, and not artificial. My poems come from actual lived experiences and wrestling with concepts and learnings and failing and trying. They are not just nice-sounding words put together.
Behind these words, and the art and the music that all creatives make, is something that cannot be replicated by AI.
Use AI for mundane lower-level tasks if you must. But leave the art-making for the humans endowed with understanding and feeling and meaning-making.
Prompts: sky, ocean, floating
Youuuu make art. You paint. You write. You don't lose sight of the immaterial. For your own sake.
Sincerely,
A poet 🌷