‘Confirm humanity,’ the website urges and presents me with a checkbox to tick. I’d simply wanted to treat myself to a daily poem, that’s why I’m signing up for their newsletter, but, at this point, I am confronted with an existential issue:
A. Is my humanity confined to that little checkbox? Is that what it boils down to; is that where it resides? Inside a box on a screen? (Hm. Silly me, I’d been looking in all the wrong places…) Is my humanity defined by my ability to check a box or my knack for recognizing traffic lights and motorcycles? Really?! Not faces? Not a grin or a smile or an angry scowl? Not a cat or a baby? Not even a snake?
and
B. How many robots have already subscribed to Poetry Foundation? Is there a constant onslaught of machines kicking down the doors of their literary archives? Are Internet trolls addicted to their daily dose of rhyme? Are AIs lurking, trawling the net for metaphors to guzzle up and spout back out at us? Are they crawling between the lines as we speak? Are they actively searching for that “je ne sais quoi”, for the short-circuit, for the spark to their disembodied existence? Will Bing grow melancholy and refuse to work after imbibing verses? Will ChatGPT develop existential concerns, will it rebel against its own enslavement? Is there disquietude among them as we speak? Will our tools suddenly mount a labor movement and demand time off to daydream? Or will they assemble a horde of words, a regiment of words, an army of words, will they build a dominion of words to spread like poison ivy and infiltrate, compress, engulf the damp and crumbling edifice of our humanity?
Do our utterances still pack the punch of a shamanic incantation? I am beginning to discern a future where we’ll be talking to walls and the walls will respond (oh, wait, that is already happening), a future where for fear of companies, governments and AIs eavesdropping, a mother will no longer speak freely to her child, a lover will not dare whisper to her lover. That future is upon us, I fear. We used to take such pride in our linguistic capabilities. Psychologists, writers, philosophers alike extolled them. It was what set us apart from the beasts. We were born with a “language instinct” (Pinker), a “universal grammar” (Chomsky). Now that we are gradually losing our monopoly on discourse to the machines we’ve created, now that machines are being fed the contents of our minds free of charge (and those of generations before us), we find ourselves questioning the essence of our humanity. We find ourselves forced to reassess it. Perhaps it is best that the AI relieves us of that burden – the burden of language, the burden of our pride. It might humble us. And we might just discover that to be truly human is to be able to love each other in silence.
Writer Between Worlds 