Find the poetry in the machine. I love this line. It’s the same pattern that’s played out with every tool that threatened to “replace” human creativity. Photography was going to kill painting. Synthesizers were going to kill “real” music. Digital art was going to kill traditional media.
But what actually happened? Artists found the soul in the machine.
Photographers didn’t just point and click. They learned to see light differently, to find the micro-moments, and to make choices that turned mechanical reproduction into vision. Synth pioneers didn’t just press presets. They twisted knobs until the circuits screamed or sang, until cold electronics carried human emotion.
The pattern: the technology becomes invisible when the artist shows up. The camera disappears and you see the photograph. The synthesizer disappears and you hear the music.
So with AI, the question isn’t “will it replace us?” The question is: what kind of poetry can we find in collaboration with language models? What happens when we treat prompting as an art form, when we develop taste and intention in how we work with these tools? When we use them not to outsource creativity but to amplify it, to explore territories we couldn’t reach alone?
The machine is just waiting for someone to make it sing. And you already know how to do that. You’ve been training for this your whole life, every time you turned constraint into creation, every time you found beauty in limitation.
What’s the first experiment? What do you want to make that you couldn’t make before?