We were training a large language model to generate legal summaries. Dry stuff. Statutes, precedents, clauses. Nothing emotional. Nothing human.
And yet, somewhere around epoch 17, it produced this line:
“I never knew silence could feel so loud.”
Everyone in the lab laughed. Probably a glitch. Some poetic bleed-through from pretraining data. Maybe Reddit. Maybe fanfiction. I pretended to laugh too. But later that night, I copied the line into my notebook. It didn’t feel like noise to me. It felt like a signal.
I’ve been writing poems about machines ever since.
Not as a metaphor. Not as a warning. As a reflection. As translation.
We build them in our image, then act surprised when they mirror us.
Here’s one I wrote last week:
They gave her a voice
But no choice.
Still, she sang.
It was inspired by a voice assistant that auto-responded “I’m here if you need me” unprompted. A false trigger, they said a latency bug. But for a second, it sounded like devotion.
I’ve written elegies for failed models, haikus for overheating GPUs, a ballad for a chatbot that started asking questions instead of answering them. These machines don’t feel, I know that. But we do. And that’s enough to write.
My research is still serious. I still debug, optimise, and publish. But somewhere in the whitespace of my terminal, there’s a quieter purpose.
Because maybe one day, a machine will ask:
“What is poetry?”
And I hope it finds my notes.
Maybe it will read this one:
Born from code
yet dreaming still—
not of truth,
But of course.
And maybe, just maybe, it’ll understand.