Please Use AI, by Jo Atkins-Potts

I was taken by this poem;

read– so it seems - by a real human and written by a real human also.

Please use AI when your mother dies.

Ask it what grief feels like

Let it explain bereavement in 12 clear bullet points

Do not spend years finding her in the supermarket by the tomatoes she always bought.

Discovering new ways to miss her.

Please use AI the next time you fall in love.

Ask it how to know whether someone is the one.

It will give you a faster answer than watching a person become familiar

Learning how they take their tea, which floorboards will wake them, how their silence sounds when something is wrong.

Please use AI for your wedding vows, your eulogies, your apologies

Why struggle for the right words when a machine can give you beautiful ones?

I was struck, listening to Atkins-Potts’ poetry, by the religious nature of the tasks she ‘suggests’ for AI; grief, love, marriages, funerals. It’s certainly the case that I’m increasingly aware of AI ‘improved’ speeches as I accompany members from cradle to grave and how different they feel to old-school human written articulations. It’s true for example, that the AI ‘improved’ speeches are, precisely in the sense Atkins-Potts suggests, ‘better’ than their human-written counterparts. They are smoother. There is a success about their structure and length, and the ticking of all the right boxes. But these AI ‘improved’ speeches contain no grit.

I don’t mind lovers or mourners resorting to AI support when the emotions are beyond our ability to craft. But I prefer the way of our tradition, which offers the simplest, briefest ritual holder to allow a moment to be recognised before life will prove how much we remember, or mourn, or love; “you are betrothed to me with this ring,” is the only thing a lover says under the Chuppah. “I wish you a long life,” is the only thing that needs to be said at a Shiva. And then the real test is revealed as life moves forward. As Golda observes in Fiddler on the Roof, “after 25 years...”

The really important thing is not to run away from or down-value the necessary messiness of human life, not to elevate the value of “smoothness” above its more human counterpart, not to confuse successful structure, length and balance with honesty. Honesty and humanity, especially in the most important (and religious) parts of our lives, will be gritty, uneven and probably a little overlong. That, I believe – and I hope you’ve read this far – is the point.