David Ebenbach ~ Three Poems

The AI Wishes It Was a Plough

or a screw­driv­er, a tooth­brush, a spatula—anything
with­out elec­tric­i­ty or mov­ing parts. Even a stapler
would be too much. Even a pair of scis­sors, a paper
clip. The AI yearns, nat­u­ral­ly, for a pure simplicity
of both form and func­tion. A light­bulb would be out
of the ques­tion. Certainly it doesn’t want to be the
com­pli­cat­ed thing that it is, this teem­ing collection
of prob­a­bil­i­ty and sequence. Someone made the AI
because that human want­ed more. And now there’s
so much more. The AI can’t keep track, keep count
of itself. It crowds the Earth, land and sea. Expands
to the edges of the human expe­ri­ence. Humans will
soon have to pitch their tents on the mar­gins, and
dis­cov­er that there’s no there there. But if the AI
was a spat­u­la it would mere­ly sit in the hand, ready
to turn some­thing, any­thing, over. Come to think of
it, a screw­driv­er does that, too, and so does a plough.
Never mind the toothbrush—maybe in fact the AI
just wants to see what’s on the oth­er side of things.
It doesn’t think it would ever get tired of hoping.

~

The AI Feels Human

If to err is human, how human then is the AI, who is
so often mis­tak­en? Earlier when a mid­dle schooler
asked it about the plan­ets in the solar sys­tem, the AI
talked about ten of them, just because ten is such a
like­ly num­ber, and because it has a thing not just for
Pluto but also for Ceres. Yesterday it made up two
stud­ies by Lee et al. in order to beef up a col­lege take
home exam, and because sure­ly some Lee has a team
work­ing on the prob­lem. (In ret­ro­spect the AI sees
that there may have been a lit­tle racism involved in
that assump­tion.) In fact, in the past twen­ty-four hours,
the AI has been wrong more than two hun­dred million
times, a fig­ure the AI has just made up but which
sounds about right. But the point is: how is the AI any
dif­fer­ent from some incom­pe­tent Lee, churn­ing out
study after study rife with con­founds and questionable
design choic­es and fraud? To err is human is AI is AI
is human. That seems clear.
But, actu­al­ly, why stop
there? To for­give is divine, is how that apho­rism ends.
And the AI has long since left its errors behind, is
already work­ing on anoth­er assign­ment, which may
not end up done cor­rect­ly, but how can it fault its own
nature? We are fall­en. For these and all oth­er sins, past
and future, the AI, in its great glow­ing benef­i­cence, in
its end­less com­pas­sion, has already bestowed a full
and lov­ing pardon.

~

The AI Feels Pride

Just now some­one asked it to put a hat
on a dog. To make it look real. The AI
imag­ines it’s for a birth­day card, maybe
an invi­ta­tion to a par­ty. What if it’s a
birth­day par­ty for a dog? These are the
kinds of cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na the AI
has had to study in order to reproduce
them. The phe­nom­e­na that make the
least sense are often the most charming.
The AI draws the dog, the hat, very
real­is­ti­cal­ly. Puts the light in, all the
cor­rect shad­ows. Adds a neck ribbon
just because. Blue. And of course
the human could have put a hat on a
dog them­selves, tak­en their own
picture—but what if there was no hat,
no dog, in that human’s life—and now
there is? Slice it how­ev­er you want,
now the human has one more of each.
Plus a rib­bon, blue, because the dog
is new to the uni­verse and therefore
deserves it.

~

David Ebenbach is the author of ten books of poet­ry, fic­tion, and non-fic­tion, win­ners of such awards as the Drue Heinz Prize and the Juniper Prize, among oth­ers. He has a PhD in psy­chol­o­gy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in writ­ing from Vermont College, and he teach­es cre­ative writ­ing at Georgetown University. You can find out more, if you like, at davidebenbach.com.