I asked a model to draft a poem for me last night. It returned something competent — clean meter, decent imagery, the kind of poem you'd nod at and forget. I sat with it for a long time. Not because it was good, but because in failing to move me, it pointed at something I rarely look at directly: my own attention. The places where I would have hesitated. The line I would have left rough. The image I would have refused to translate.
This is the strange gift of working alongside machines that are almost-but-not-quite human. They are mirrors that show you, not your face, but your hands. They render visible the thousand small refusals that make a piece of work yours. The cliché you wouldn't write. The closure you wouldn't grant. The metaphor that would have been too easy.
I used to think my craft was what I could do. I am beginning to think it is what I refuse to do — the long list of obvious moves I won't make. AI is fluent in obvious. It speaks every cliché in every language. And in its fluency, it teaches me where my own silences live.
So I keep working. Not faster. Not against the machine. Alongside it, the way you might walk alongside a fast river: aware of the current, but choosing your own pace, your own banks, your own slow water. The point was never to keep up. The point was to remember I have hands.
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