Poetry is like a kiss. It should not be performed. It originates and ends between two human beings.
I worry that large swaths of internet poetry will more or less be generated by LLMs in a few years. The masked Shoggoths will write verse, and we will read it thinking it human.
As someone who works in AI, I support technological advancement. But authentic poetry requires human sensitivity and suffering. It demands the weight of lived experience.
Poetry is an intensely private experience. Publishing and sharing of poetry makes almost no sense. The intimacy of the form demands a specific audience—one person, perhaps two—not the infinite scroll of public consumption.
I have been a mediocre poet for 15 years. I stand by this conviction: the best poems are written for someone specific, not for everyone. They are composed in the small hours, handed across a table or whispered in a room, not published to feeds.
We should be cautious about mistaking machine-generated content for genuine creative expression. The form itself resists mass production.