Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on my Substack in February 2025

To say that I have a favorite poem might be a bit of a stretch; I loved my lone college poetry class at Syracuse, but wouldn’t call myself a devotee of the genre. Alas, if pressed while at whatever passes for an Algonquin Round Table these days, I would offer perhaps the poem I remember best: “The Red Wheelbarrow”, by William Carlos Williams. Originally titled “XXII” — those Roman numerals add up to 22! — and from the book Spring and All, the Wikipedia entry for the poem itself devotes hundreds of words discussing the poem; the poem itself is sixteen (XVI) words.

Is it memorable because it’s so short? Is it great because it’s merely memorable? Is it too glib and flip and quick and quirky that it really counts more as an ad slogan than a poem?

Do you care?

Good poetry is a little like former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese talking about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” “The Red Wheelbarrow” is not an excerpt from The Iliad, nor is it a Shakespearean sonnet. Nor was it composed by committee or focus-grouped like an ad campaign for a soft drink with Seal as a seal.

It reminds me of another memorable quip (attribution unknown): “Perfect is good, done is better.”

‘I’m Something of a Writer Myself’

For the Creative Class, writing these days is limited to a well-composed email, or a really clever tweet; calling the tweet a tweet is way more creative, IMHO, than calling it a “post on X,” but we are where we are.

But that email was great! My tweet should have gone viral!

Enter the world of AI. Why write a blog post when you can ask ChatGPT or Grok or another machine to write a blog post for you. You just need to know how to correctly ask it to write a blog post for you. Logic be darned, as you don’t need to think your way through a blog post, you just need to think your way through the one question — “Write me a 400-word blog post about someone with writer’s block and how they got through it” — and let the machine do the rest.

When Creativity Gets Replaced By Prompts

When AI started getting interesting and I had to conduct team meetings, I tried to start them off with art. Not just any art, mind you, but AI-generated art that was, sometimes, rather out there.

Not just Trump-playing-keyboards out there…stuff like this:

I could go on — and attendees at those meetings were probably asking me to stop — but the point here is that the quality was fine, the messages were weird, and the “art” wasn’t really art.

‘I’m Something of an Artist Myself’

Back when NFTs were first a thing — they’re coming back, I just know it! — I created a bunch of art. Like tons of it. Hundreds of images. First, playing around with sketching programs on my phone, then using other programs to manipulate shapes, add colors and effects, and aim for some sort of aesthetic. First, the early work:

Then, a later piece:

Is the art any good? Would you put it on a wall? Is it gallery-worthy?

None of this really matters, actually. Which brings us to the point of the article.

Without a Creative Outlet, What Are We?

I could pound away at a keyboard — this article has taken me the better part of an afternoon; it’s actually an article I started probably a month ago by writing the headline — or I could outsource the creativity to a machine. I prefer the former.

I could challenge myself to remember things without going to Wikipedia, or I could just take the lazy way out. Again, memorizing new facts and figures or asking myself what details I remember from the first baseball game I attended (August 1978, Cubs 2, Reds 0, Dave Kingman homered!) exercises parts of the brain that don’t get used as much (or ever, in the case of most phone numbers, which exist solely in your contacts, I gather).

I could play around with art — maybe leaning into the fact that 99% of it is pretty bad — or I could just ask Bing to whip up something that looks like a modern art NFT.

I don’t have the answers, but I much prefer the future with some sort of human creativity to a code-driven, cyborg-fueled AI Franken-novel.