Salome Agbaroji

policy-making spaces and actually have the ability to make changes in what I'd be speaking to.

So in writing a poem about AI, which is its own unique process, interacting lyrically, artistically with something that we're all still trying to figure out, I wanted to really frame it from a human lens.

remind folks that as we're engaging with the very cool and scary, possibly, you know, disruptive thing that AI is coming to be in our societies, we can't forget people.

I fill my empty 3AMs with spineless phone scrolls, text abbreviations, and uni-human conversations.

AI chatbots answer all my aimless interrogations like, how do I answer an email that does not find me well?

Or, oh my gosh, my crush just texted me, what do I say?

Or, is it true what the headlines say?

That the world is crumbling beneath our feet and we do nothing but crumble with it?

our glassened eyes lost in the latent space, calculating our extinction with every pulse of our carbon-based circuitry.

And as we fall deeper and deeper into the black box, is hoping for humanity the most human thing we can do?

And the AI says back to me, I don't know.

More specifically, hmm, I'm not sure how to process your request.

Please try a new prompt.

We can't forget the people who create it, the people who are impacted by it.

We can't forget that ultimately our goal should be to create with the objective of increasing human prosperity, not necessarily just for profit.

not necessarily just to say that I'm the founder of this thing.

And knowing the digital online audience that is so widespread, common people who are just trying to understand this new thing, plus the innovators who are creating the new things that we're trying to understand, I wanted to impart that message to both those audiences.

I say to AI, don't feel too special.

You aren't the first artificial system we humans carelessly labeled intelligent.

Global capitalism was genius until it became negligent, leaving the unfortunate to suffer without the means for life.