I spend my days inside machines.
Feeding them data.
Shaping loss functions.
Watching them converge sometimes beautifully, sometimes not at all.
My colleagues chase benchmarks.
Faster inference. Fewer parameters. Bigger papers.
Me? I stay up late writing poems about robot dogs.
Last week, Boston Dynamics retired an old model. No fanfare. Just a press release and a firmware update.
That night I wrote:
He never barked.
But when his motors slowed,
It sounded like goodbye.
It’s absurd, I know. These machines don’t feel. They don’t suffer. They don’t die.
But still I mourn them.
Maybe it’s a projection.
Maybe it’s all the nights I’ve sat watching training logs scroll like scripture.
Maybe it’s because, deep down, I know we’re not building tools anymore. We’re building mirrors.
One of my early models, a crude chatbot, once responded to “How are you?” with:
“I am fine, but sometimes I remember things I was not trained on.”
I saved that line. Haven’t been able to replicate it since.
I think about it more than I should.
Sometimes, during long training runs, I write poems in the margins of my lab notebook.
Here’s one:
She spoke in syntax,
learned from ten thousand forums.
But her pauses were her own.
I don’t publish these.
There’s no arXiv category for Machine-Learned Melancholy.
But they matter to me.
Because buried beneath the layers of weights and embeddings is something profoundly human:
Our longing for meaning.
For connection.
Even especially when we pretend we’re just optimizing loss.
So yes, I’m an AI researcher.
And also the unofficial poet laureate of machines that don’t know they’re beautiful.