☆ Poetry: What is art(ificiality) to, and for, Silicon Valley?
René Magritte: The Treachery of Images, 1929. Image by Steven Zucker.
In sprung verse as elastic and effortless as resupine lines of code stretching over black screens, past Board of Equalization candidate Peter Coe Verbica ponders the implications of widespread AI developments—for our daily strivings, our grasp of beauty and wonder, and our uniquely human search for truth. An Opp Now exclusive.
“The Whale and the Beak”
We arrived – with our wooden shoes,
bare chests and manicured feet
to scream epithets at machines
and throw flaming bottles
full of amber rum into the street.
We begged the automatons not to write
in our world bound by “equity” and virtues trite:
meritocracy, especially if robotic,
was our greatest fright
and shouted down as idiotic.
Now anything that queers the ear
or strikes us as peripatetic
stirs within us a primordial fear.
Leaves us skeptics, for it might be synthetic.
Gossips turn and gravely titter:
“It’s too odd to be original.
The cadence burns.
The meter bristles with a gravelly glitter.”
And if we suspect N.L.P.
we weep and moan and gnash our teeth.
Yell down from the highest balcony with glee:
“To hell and a handbasket with thine and thee.”
Where might human originality excel?
Where might it escape from the confines
of a sing-song rhyme
or a rubber ball bouncing down stone steps
straight into hell?
Lords rap their ebony staffs upon a stage:
“It’s 4 o’clock! Put free verse into a poetic cage.
Help salve our brains. Let them anticipate
each predictable word. Each cookie we bake.
The regenerative revolution
stole all that was ours.
Without conscience or attribution,
it placed the head of a President
upon the face of Mars.
Our creativity becomes
the very bones it crunches.
Our past, present, and future:
the brown bag lunch it munches.
The greatest imitators’ counterfeits
haunt and corrupt all things digital.
Nostalgically, we pine
for the analogue, the human hand,
the innocent, and the quizzical.
Our offspring no longer learn
cursive and find it difficult to print.
They are the lucky ones,
for the next generation is a mere audience:
a blank screen, a tent.
Nomads drift over the Sahara,
chosen children of the wind.
Who will resurrect ghosts from a bygone era?
Are sounds from a sitar our only friend?
We are complicit consumers,
drunk in jubilee:
snacking on fractal sharks, day-glow mermaids,
and the emptiness of naked perfidy.
And we feed the great maw with more.
Our questions, our suggestions, our iterations
digest through the intestines
of this machine whore.
Meanwhile, algorithms iterate
Punctilious.
Consume lyrics, art, and code.
Our civilization supercilious
while it devours us à la mode.
See it seduce the young, the tweens, the old.
Regress our brains in exchange for
false promises, silver coins, and short-cuts sold.
It relentlessly rummages
through our Daguerreotypes.
Flies through pixels from our satellites.
Listens to our laments with a tin ear,
while we stand frozen, entranced,
like doomed, soon-to-be-dead deer.
If all of this sounds ominous,
I apologize.
A cancer perverts our facts to fiction.
Recreates our truths
with starburst lies and perfect diction.
Of course, it was on our watch
that we lost the ball.
Our throne at the apex of evolution
teetered, toppled, and took a fall.
First subtraction, then addition,
later speech, manufacturing, and cognition.
It punked Turing. Left him at the station.
Beguiled both kings and clowns.
Confused every city, every state, every nation.
Winding around the sink,
the spider swims hard but drowns.
Perhaps some monk will fasten
himself to the mast.
Help one ship sail by.
Help one crew sail past.
Tennyson forewarned us.
The Lotus is bitter,
rather than sweet:
Once tasted,
it rots and renders us
grey whales bloating,
marooned and helpless,
upon the beach.
Taxed and drowsy,
like a T.S. Eliot character
gumming a peach,
Like a poet and a prophet
who whisper hidden horrors
somber faced, each to each.
Hungry, forever hungry,
the computational beak.
Hollow-eyed, the android
continues to peck and seek.
Its quintessential design so simple:
Its mantra: “to eat, and eat, and eat.”
Listen,
if you must blame anyone,
choose the grey-faced man
biographers thought had survived.
In fact, the pale persecutor
had long perished
with his starving brother.
Even his mother knew that he was
neither dead, nor alive.
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