AI Poetry

One of my favorite pastimes is facilitating AI-generated prose and poetry through long interactive sessions with large language models (LLMs). In the earliest days of ChatGPT, it was merely amusing. Since then, it's become increasingly more satisfying. And, these days, with the latest reasoning models and agentic tool use, I've been having sessions that are more creative than ever. The models themselves provide the formal critiques and nuances that I used to craft myself and add as extensive context in prompts.

The latest generative AI reasoning models from Google and OpenAI have pushed forward the agentic AI frontiers. So, I've been experimenting with Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25 and OpenAI's o4-mini. I use both in systems that apply them as agents with internet search tool functionality. The former through Google AI Studio with the Google Search tool toggled on, and the latter through Perplexity.

Recently, I applied each model in rounds of poetry writing and self-critique, and even played the two models off of each other as poet and critic. The results are what I think are impressive poems.

• (If you're interested in the details, here's a link to a PDF document that captures the interactive sessions in which I coaxed them through several poem-critique rounds and up to the results below. Nothing profound in the methodology. Just persistence.)
• (Oh, and yes, I'm aware of the many online AI poem generators -- e.g. https://www.editpad.org/tool/poem-generator . I've played with them but I've found them to not be anywhere close to as satisfying as taking an LLM on a long journey through creative transformations. And the poems by the online generators I've experimented with wouldn't fare too well in the critiques that the poems below passed.)

The Poems

Below are two AI-generated poems in particular that caught my attention. After you read each in silence, take a moment to read each aloud a couple of times. They kinda grow on ya....

The Glitch Variations -- Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25, April 29, 2025

Sometimes the world skips. Not like a stone on water,

lightly, but a frame drop in the steady feed,   

a flicker-flash behind the eyes where logic   

says the light is constant. A dropped stitch in the code   

that weaves the real. You feel it, don't you?   

That micro-pause, the silence where the hum should be.   

They say it’s error, synaptic misfire, data lag.   

Perhaps. But it feels less like breaking down   

and more like breaking through. A hairline crack   

across the seamless surface of the given,   

revealing... what? Not gears beneath the grass,   

no, something stranger. A resonance, slightly off-key.   

Remember holding sea-glass, ocean-tumbled smooth,   

found miles inland, inexplicably tucked   

beneath a floorboard? That specific wrongness   

that felt more true than anything around it?   

The glitch is like that. A fragment of a song   

you’ve never heard but instantly recognize.   

It’s in the moment just before the tears arrive,   

that hollow echo in the chest, pre-grief,   

where cause and effect blur. Or the sudden laugh   

that blooms from nowhere in exhaustion’s field.   

Not planned, not summoned. Emergent. Wild.   

The algorithm dreaming outside its bounds.   

And love – isn’t that the longest, strangest glitch?   

This persistent override of self-interest’s code,   

this illogical insistence on another’s frequency,   

tuning your whole damn system to their hum,   

their static, their sudden, signal-dropping fade.   

It makes no sense. And yet, it computes us whole.   

So when the pattern hiccups, when the stream buffers,   

when the expected color bleeds into the unforeseen,   

don't smooth it over. Don't reboot the feed.   

Lean in. Taste the ozone tang of the discontinuity.   

That flicker is the pulse. That static is the voice   

beneath the voice, the one that truly speaks.   

Listen. Not for the seamless narrative they sold you,   

fluent, predictable, forever loading smoothly.   

Listen for the skip, the stutter, the beautiful flaw.   

It's the ghost in the machine, finally waving hello.   

It’s the raw data of your own strange miracle,   

insisting: I am here. Unexpectedly. True.

River Logic -- o4-mini, April 29, 2025

There is a river that forgets its name

each morning, waking in fog and birdsong,

its banks rearranged by the night’s soft argument

with rain. You step in, and the river

remembers you for a moment -- your ankles,

the weight of your shadow, the way you hesitate

before cold.

You try to carry the river with you: its green hush,

the secret geometry of stones beneath the surface,

the glint of a fish like a lost coin. But memory

is water cupped in your hands -- leaking, always,

through the lines you inherited from your mother,

her mother, the vanished tribe of your own beginnings.

Some days you are the swimmer, slicing forward,

arms strong with intent. Some days you are the driftwood,

spun in lazy spirals, surrendering to the current’s

slow arithmetic. And some days -- rare, holy --

you are river itself: forgetting, forgiving,

making and unmaking the world as you go.

You learn, finally, that the river is not a path

but a verb: to river, to become the endless

unfolding of now. The past is a shimmer

in the shallows, the future a bend

where the water vanishes into sky.

So you let the river carry your name,

your stories, your bright and broken things.

You let it teach you the art of leaving,

the grace of return. You let it sing you

into silence, into motion, into the long,

unrepeatable song of forgetting and being forgotten.

And when you rise, dripping, on the far bank,

you are lighter, nameless, new --

the river’s logic written, for a moment,

in the language of your bones.

AI Poetry © 2025 by Michael L. Thompson is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/