“without tenderness, we are in hell.” 2023.

In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, we find ourselves at a crossroads where technology and artistry intersect. For this project, I wanted to explore how AI intersects with poetry. I was reading a text by Boris Gray titled ‘From Writing to Prompting: AI as Zeitgeist-Machine,’ where he talks about how AI challenges traditional authorship by producing texts that are often indistinguishable from those written by humans, when I got the idea for this project. The title (“without tenderness, we are in hell.”) is taken from a poem by Adrienne Rich.

Poetry has always been a sanctuary for our most profound emotions, the vessel through which we convey our innermost thoughts. It has the ability to resonate deeply within the human soul. For this project, I took lines of poetry (almost entirely written by me) and created some form of a relationship with some photos I had taken. Together, they conveyed a story. They are evocative, personal, and deeply human, exemplifying the tenderness that is intrinsically woven into the fabric of poetic expression. Then, I gave ChatGPT the lines of poetry and watched it dissect and deconstruct them—simulating an understanding of the human experience, in a way. We then see a transformation that occurs when tender, personal, human feelings are distilled through a mechanized process. It confirms something we already knew - AI may replicate patterns, identify themes, and deconstruct language, but it cannot authentically experience the human condition.

In the absence of tenderness, we risk descending into a cold, mechanical world—what Richie describes as “hell.”