Labyrinth

Sorina Oberholzer | February 2023

There’s a poem by Kenyatta Rogers called Labyrinth.

It evokes for me the bleakness of those first weeks of hard lockdown – the starkness, the experience of loneliness, the unseasonable chill.

The sense of being always hungry despite not having an appetite.

I have the same inner-feeling sense when I consider a world where a language AI is left to speak on my behalf.

I’ve lost something and I can’t describe
what it is

A somewhat sardonic dread about a world that is less-than.

A world where words are ample but less considered; where our creativity continues to homogenise as our poems follow down the same path that brought us Autotune and Instagram Filters.

Like rolling 2 gears together
and maybe teeth are missing in one
or both

Maybe I’m overreacting. I can certainly see the seductiveness of producing a completely adequate albeit boring business proposal by typing a couple of keywords into a taskbar, then telling it to make it sexier.

More punchy. Now really bring it home.

A pile of things that are
almost completely worthless
a shoebox full of sporks
a well with a bucket and a rope
that’s too short

And of course I can resist. Champion the cause. Fight the good fight. Save the children from a world in which they exist only as avatars.

I’ve always liked 
a little grit

But what about that day when I may find myself too tired, or too busy, or a little under the weather, and a language AI just happens to find words that were almost – exactly – not quite right, but approximates what I thought I should be thinking about on that topic that everyone is thinking about thinking about…

imagine being someplace you know
so well but are lost and don’t have any idea
how to get out

I fear for a future in which none of us know what we really think about anything, or where we stand on any topic of importance, or when I have to stand up for my soul, because an AI has completed my thought.

I can’t describe
what it’s like to
sit on opposite ends
of a park bench and
not know how
to get any closer

I fear for a future in which none of us know what we really think about anything, or where we stand on any topic of importance, or when we need to rally and rage because our souls depend on it… simply because we’ve allowed an AI to usurp our words, and steer our thoughts not to completion, but into oblivion.