I suppose that artificial intelligence can have some useful, even miraculous purposes. But do we really need a computer composing poetry? creating a painting? writing a song? (especially writing a song!!) Why? Haven’t humans been generating works of art for millennia?
So allow me to protest.
© Steven E. Cutts, 2023
a Studio C recording, January 2024
Can we leave writing poems to honest-to-God people
And not to the whims of machines?
It’s true, we’ve invented ingenious devices,
But their way with words may not be what it seems.
Our ancestors knew not to toy with the muses,
To revere inspiration for verse.
We need to resist innovation and leave poems
To humans for better or worse.
Let’s leave making paintings to genuine artists
Applying their sensitive touch.
With genius on genius down through the centuries,
Would that be asking too much?
It’s talent that renders with brush or with pencil
And draws from down deep in one’s soul
A view of the world of today
Or of life long ago.
A wise woman said, “Don’t believe everything that you think.”
We don’t have to use everything that invention can bring.
Why can’t we leave writing songs to musicians
Whose brains work in rhythm and rhyme,
Who’ve stepped ‘round a room to a waltz
In three-quarter time?
Why not leave it to those who are actually expert
In crafting a pleasurable tune,
Who’ve felt love and despair and then hope
And stared up at the Moon.
Can spitting out patterns of ones and of zeroes compete
with a true human being?
When it comes to artistic expression, I don’t trust
a machine.
