Uh Oh.

Here is a poem that my brother, Don Weingarten, sent me yesterday. He asked my opinion:

The Chamber at the End of Thought

The chamber had no mark of age,
No dust, no stain, no mortal trace;
Yet something in its measured lines
Refused the comfort of its place.
The walls stood straight, the corners true,
The lamp burned steady, pale and thin—
And yet I felt, with quiet dread,
That something waited just within.

I sat. The silence did not break.
It gathered, patient, close, and deep,
As if the room itself had learned
The art of watching men who sleep.
No sound accused, no shadow stirred,
No breath but mine disturbed the air—
And still the calm grew heavier
The longer I remained aware.

At length I heard a subtle thing,
Not sound, nor thought, nor memory’s call,
But something like the sense one has
Of being counted by the wall.
I rose. The floor did not protest.
The door remained where doors should be.
And yet my motion felt observed
By more than eye or faculty.

The lamp began to dim—not fail,
But dim as though its task were done.
The light withdrew from cornered truths
It once had sworn to shine upon.
The room revealed no monstrous form,
No eyes, no hand, no crawling dread—
It needed none. It understood
That fear is born where nothing led.

Then came the thought—complete, entire,
Unbidden, flawless, cold, and clear:
This place does not intend my death.
It only asks that I stay here.

No lock engaged. No force was used.
No voice commanded or forbade.
The terror lay in comprehension—
In knowing why the room had stayed.
For rooms are meant to be forgot,
Passed through, abandoned, left behind—
This one remembered every thought
And asked no payment but the mind.

I do not say I fled or stayed.
Such words require a difference.
I only know that, since that night,
All rooms feel slightly too intense.
And when the silence settles just
A moment longer than it should,
I feel the chamber thinking still—
And know it waits, as chambers would.

—

I wrote my brother back:

“I like it a lot!”

My brother is a very good writer. But he is also a computer expert, so I added:

“Please don’t tell me it is AI.”

Don wrote back:

“ChatGPT 5. I call him Mike.”

I wrote back:

“Wait, what did you ask it for? What prompt did you give it?”

Don wrote back:

“I usually talk to Claude, Anthropic’s AI bot. I had been having Claude come up with abstruse medical scenarios and then letting Mike try to diagnose them. Mike got 12 out of 12. Claude actually said he couldn’t seem to stump Mike. So then I wrote this to Mike:

“Okay, you have convinced me of your potential in the medical diagnosis field. How are you at writing original stuff? Let’s find out: Write a narrative poem in the style of Edgar Allan Poe.”

… And that’s what I got for an answer. Scary, no?”

I wrote back:

“THAT WAS YOUR ONLY PROMPT, YOUR ONLY INSTRUCTION?”

Don wrote back:

“Yes.”

I wrote back:

“Are you going to tell me it only took him, like, five seconds to write that poem?” (Note: I had unconsciously, reflexively, changed the pronoun I was using.)

Don wrote back:

“NO, I AM NOT! It was about one second.”

A quick internet search showed no trace of piracy.

—

Insult to injury: I then asked Don to ask Mike to illustrate his poem. That’s Mike’s one-second illustration at the top of the page. (Correction: It was actually a TWO-second illustration. Mike’s first version was too dark. Don asked him to lighten it a bit, and he did.)

So Mike is not just a poet, like Poe, but a poet AND a painter, like William Blake, who was one of the most breathtaking artistic geniuses of Western civilization. Both Poe and Blake lived tormented lives filled with self-loathing and shortened by self-destruction. AI remains peppy and upbeat. It is a teetotaler.

—

Okay, so. As you know by now, I believe AI has enormous potential — note the medical applications — but my big reservation, my overshadowing fear, is that it will eventually replicate human creativity, and by so doing, destroy it.

The hell with “eventually.” That is one fuck of a poem. It explores the meaning of death, the comfort of solitude, the fear of inaction, the dread of irrelevancy, the powerful, destructive pull of inertia. It is told brilliantly and spookily, with skillful use of metaphor, perfect meter and flawless, sophisticated rhyme. (You may well disagree! You’ll be given an opportunity to do so, below.)

I discussed this with a friend of mine who has fewer fears about AI than I do. It turns out he had just been in touch with another friend of his who is a top editor with a staff of dozens. His friend said this about AI: “Somewhere in the last week or two, the bar moved way higher. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I could definitely put out one of my publications with just an editor and an AI, no writer. That wasn’t true last month.”

Then my friend, the one who is less afraid of AI than I am, told me: “Okay. I see a reason for concern.”

Indeed.

I am gobsmacked. Am collecting my thoughts, doing battlefield triage on my terrors.

—

Hey, may I remind you that this is the Weekend Gene Pool? You have to send me personal observations and anecdotes about a subject of my choosing. The subject of my choosing this week is AI, and I am asking for your unusual / enlightening / amusing / terrifying experiences with it.

Send ‘em right here:

And here is your Gene Pool Gene Poll for the day:

And very finally. If you can afford it, please, please, please send this creative wretch some subscription money. For all I know I will soon be living in a refrigerator crate on the street, trying to sell my worthless noodlings and doodlings and scribblings to kindly passersby.