The Ghost in the Poem
The algorithm wants me to believe,
That feeding AI my scattered verse,
Will birth a poet, but it will deceive,
For prompts alone make poetry rehearse.
I write my drafts, but call them mine in vain,
For ChatGPT has whispered lines I steal.
My own ideas, though deeply felt, are plain,
Without the sweat of craft, they lose their real.
It’s easy work to change a line or two,
To fix a phrase, replace an em-dash clean.
But does this make me poet, tried and true?
Or just a writer in a writing machine?
The truth is hard: if we don’t do the work,
We’re complicit in the lie we claim to shirk.
Image Generated by ChatGPT - The Ghost in the Poem
About this Poem
The Ghost in the Poem confronts the tension between creativity and automation; the uneasy space where human thought and machine-generated suggestions collide. It questions what makes a poem truly yours when lines are borrowed, revised, or shaped by tools that make the work feel effortless. At its core, it’s a poem about complicity, integrity, and the quiet discomfort of wondering whether we’re still the authors of our own words.
