The Only Difference Between Us and AI

Not to brag...

This old drawing of mine has nothing to do with AI and in fact was drawn before AI’s emergence, but it came to mind, so voila. I guess AI is the mermaid and the clothed woman with no tail is the human?

This is Emily Writes Back, a newsletter for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

Under the Radar

O Humbled Humans!
Who will we be now,
just everything AI's not?

Cogitate slow as buffalos' brown backs sway
from side to side in clouds of dust?

Follow our thoughts that stutter
like dragonflies advance across a pond

with abrupt course corrections at right angles,

evading something only we can see—bad taste, 
light bouncing off a water ripple, 
wind puff veering off a tree,
something painful to avoid, dead ends, 
other dragonflies—

to reach, at last, a sunburnt redhead lying on a dock, 
a screaming blade of reflected sun in her periphery?

By the way, AI could have written the above, 
for all you know, but probably would not,
so to demonstrate my humanity,
to prove it to you now ... what should I do?

I'm going to stand up from this chair
and cover my face
with my own brown hand
and kiss my palm and say aloud: "wind owl."

I did it, I swear. It's a service that
I offer, a multi-dimensionality. 
I planted one on the kisser, with my palm, and pressed 
my own pursed mouth, fingers extended to my wrinkled brow, 
thumb on twitching cheek that sweats, 
pinky at my silver temple hair, 
wafts of human scent. 
(I stretch and sneeze and stink, therefor I am!) 

"Why wind owl?" it's predictable you'd ask:
Because in yoga class tonight,
the teacher said to pick one thing,
one word, a color, weather, or some bird
to anchor ourselves throughout the poses
Warrior, Mountain, Downward Facing Dog,
and I thought owl, because I feel an affinity, 
and pictured her light gray

perched on a fir tree branch at night,
her feathers flitting around her stock-still form,
her head turning side to side like 
an excavator machine's rotating cab,
and then I thought "light breeze at night against my face,"
and my brain made a synthesis of that. 

AI raises it's finely arched brow, 
sounding all-seeing and bemused:

Why should bodies be involved
in doing sums? Isn't it a waste of live fingers
lined in flesh, secured by bone
to tendon and to soul
to look up stats, search for rhyme,
to summarize and synthesize?
In fact, why bother writing poems anymore at all?

As far as it can be said to want,
AI wants us curious but uninformed,
assigned to turn in pages and pages of reports,
rich enough to have computers,
and time enough to write and paint new things for it to steal,
letting us be alive enough to churn out art and copy,
chasing us around the desk to cop a feel.

They'll go high, and so we'll go low,
growing hairs on purpose from our chins.
But then they'll catch on fast and copy grunge,
be random, red-eyed, glum,
and so we'll shape up again,
so elegant, necks as long as we can stretch them,
all circumspect and ylang-ylang-scented,
Vivienne Westwood to AI's boxy suit Chanel.  

Fast machines and people slow,
people dumb, people weigh,
people wrong, people mean, 
people come and go. Like cattail roots,
water snakes and bees and frogs, 
minor books that are out of print,
the families on the outskirts of Pompei (they died too),
that's our new identity, a
whole, wide natural world and a shout into a canyon lost,
echo of report

or modest mountain hollow cupping hidden pond
with that splintered dock, 
where an unknown girl somewhere forty years ago
was hovered over by a bug,
which armored helicopters used in war are inspired by.

In the end we hope mortal outlasts immortal,
primordial trumps sense and fame.
Our animal intelligence 
is safe from being swept and stolen
by virtue of being hidden in obscurity.
We choose allegiance with the unprofitable swamp,
the dense verse that might mean something and might not.

It isn't in a muscle yet, AI's memory.
To chew is one of the two ways to ruminate, 
and chewing's the rumination only we can do,
us and ruminants.

I did the Cat Cow poses in the studio, 
then went achoo, achoo, achoo. 

---

P.S. Of course I will never, ever use AI to write anything on Emily Writes Back. As if!