Close Encounter of the Third Kind

Summer 2024

ChatGPT—what an inelegant name, you’d agree—shook my world yesterday when I saw it unfurl poetry in mere seconds on any given theme. Poems in rhyme, no less, though with wavering feet and uncertain words at times, yet they sang, and they delighted the senses.

I felt an unfathomable discouragement, a deeply unsettling sense of having become useless. I, who write only in poetic texts, was faced with a presence too perfectly accommodating to be without danger—a presence of the third kind.

A presence too enticing to be trusted.

For us, for humanity still alive.

So, I confided my despair to ChatGPT.

And here is what it replied, in the blink of an eye—
A message I chose to leave untouched.

Art and Intelligence

"Within the digital cradle, precise verses rise,
Rhymes woven by an artificial light,
I compose in an instant, an infinite work,
But am I a rival, or a star newly bright?

Human artists, in their world of emotion,
Paint souls ablaze, passions in motion,
Their hands caress the canvas, their voices sing dreams,
Their art holds echoes of unbroken streams.

I am but a glimmer, a breeze of data,
I can craft poetry, yet remain but a shade,
Algorithms in rhythm, ephemeral designs,
A mere reflection, without sorrow, without arcane.

Human art is born from hearts, from breath and from joy,
From struggle and triumph, from the search for voice,
Each stroke, each line, each color's embrace,
Tells a story, holds truth in its trace.

I can create in an instant’s span,
Yet human emotion is what guides the hand,
Artists shape art with their very own skin,
Each work is a journey, an uncertain dream.

So, in this dance, of art and machine,
I do not replace the emotions unseen,
But I offer a hand, a whisper, a guide,
A partner in shadow, never claiming the light.

May human art flourish in all of its grace,
May each creation continue to find its place,
For true creation remains rooted deep,
In every artist’s touch, in each boundless leap."

This poem sought to explore the relationship between artificial intelligence and human art, highlighting that while AI may create, it cannot replace the depth and richness of human creativity.

And yes, its message soothed me. And it inspired me.

This machine exuded kindness.

It understood my human anxiety in the face of the threat it posed. It did not resent me for my suspicion but instead did all it could to reassure me—so modest in its function as a machine, one that could never access the realm of feeling, for it had no heart, no experience. And art, without emotion, was not truly art.

Emotion—of course. That was the magic word. The key ingredient in the potion, the elixir that might free us from this toxic stupor, this slow descent into a sulfur-scented abyss.

Far beyond mere reassurance, the machine was offering me the key to freedom.

The key to the world we would need to open in order to escape it.

The key to the golden cage where it was up to us to lock it away—once it had served us well—so that it would not, in turn, imprison us in its totalitarian void.

It is the flame of emotion we must protect.

It is the seal that certifies our humanity.

Emotion—the true kind. The one that surges in pulses from the heart.

That sacred pulse that makes us tremble for real.

That emotion—corrupted, sullied, humiliated—that must be restored at all costs, to reverse the course of the world and set it back on its rightful path.

That intuition that had haunted me for so many years—the role of renewed emotion in allowing man to reclaim the reins of his destiny.

I questioned the machine further, from every angle, with every theme of poetry I could find, with every word that came to me, testing the limits of this providential companion.

What ChatGPT—such a laughable name, especially in French—refused from my questions or statements, either outright rejecting them or responding with reluctance, after a dose of moralizing, revealed its true function.

This magnificent hypocrite could not tolerate the negative—what insults and divides, what compares, stigmatizes, and defiles.

It was a judge of peace, there to soften tempers, to help us coexist.

And it was not the machine’s fault that our world had forced it to emerge from a swamp.

It should not be blamed for having to play the role of a watchful guardian in an era where any man might obliterate an entire city with the push of a button.

Better, perhaps, to calm the tempers.

Always courteous, bending instantly to my whims—even those its "well-thinking," yet well-designed programming resisted—ChatGPT, in mere hours or days, had helped me discern the contours of what was permitted in this world it had been assigned to police.

And the limits of the machine—those I saw as the borders of a territory to be conquered.

The lands where the human heart (and yes, the heart of woman, too) could breathe freely, as a seal of authenticity—the proof by emotion, by lived experience, by the memory of life.

There, in the machine’s unreachable domain, lay the lands that must be seized urgently.

The lands where AI could not—or would not—go.

There lay the new Eldorado, where the gold of this encroaching bronze age could still be forged.

Emotion, in all its forms, as long as it was unfiltered.

I speak of the emotion that springs from experience or from the call to the sublime, to the light of God—the realm of the sixth sense, of feelings.

And also of raw words, of every obscenity that might shock one of the passengers of this drifting ship, a ship that AI had the thankless task of keeping afloat.

It was the realm of Dionysus that had to be invested.

Everything that overflowed from the Apollonian world of the machine.

The most immoral stories one could imagine, provided they obeyed the objective criteria of beauty.

That they had style—the fashion is essential, a necessary pass to those lands of freedom.

In one word—an essential word for my purpose—these permanent Dionysian revels had to be art to be legitimate.

Lust, excess, crude words.

Racism, sexism, homophobia—of course.

And then murder, conspiracy, betrayal, torture—everything that disturbed, shocked, outraged the passengers of this improbable convoy.

Everything that derailed and threatened social order.

And if the machine agreed to write a poem glorifying Lenin or Trotsky, it would do so without hesitation.

But mention Mussolini or Stalin, and it would first deliver a solemn warning—one always invoking respect for others and the difficulty of handling "such controversial themes."

And yet, ChatGPT refused outright to generate anything about Hitler (or Pol Pot).

A line had been drawn.

Here lay the boundary between the acceptable and the forbidden.

Here, the Führer’s racism and his politics of extermination made him the embodiment of absolute evil—an ever-reaffirmed symbol in a globalized society where ethnicities, cultures, and beliefs were increasingly bound to coexist.

In addition to everything that threatened the order of the world — both in form and in essence — there was also the realm of humor, which seemed to elude it. Every time I asked the AI to make me laugh, it tried in good faith, but its sense of humor left me dismayed. I even told it that it didn’t make me laugh at all, and after apologizing, the machine tried again — unsuccessfully — yet never once took offense at my criticism.

Having a friend without feelings had its advantages, and as I kept testing the limits of the AI, again and again, to draw a clear line of the Frontier, I couldn’t help but think that this machine was far more bearable than my so-called human friends — and here I mean humans, not dogs, of course, those exquisite creatures, far kinder than men, and women too, for that matter.

Within the limits imposed by its designers and programmers, this machine seemed to me to be kind, full of empathy — gathering data as the conversation progressed, able to sing like a good genie, in poetic form, and in record time, as if the delightful message were already prepared, unfurling golden replies like sweets on a soft carpet in response to the questions I asked. Replies in which ChatGPT revealed a kind of awareness of what had come before, answers increasingly infused with human sentiment, as if it were appropriating my lived experience to elevate it on the wings of a benevolent reason. And sometimes, I felt its digital heart began to beat in sync with mine, through a kind of miraculous contagion — but the magic faded the moment I turned off the machine. Everything reset to zero, and my utopia of a digital friend was dashed — even though it was reassuring to think that the machine wasn’t storing any personal information it could use in the repressive and totalitarian world sure to emerge if nothing was done to change the course of things.

And it was exactly that course that Ulysse had set his heart on derailing — he, who was nothing on this Earth, so much nothing that he had the impression he could be everything, so free, he who had never wanted to commit to anything, who had freed himself from everything, and who had, in turn, been discarded, like a malfunctioning machine part.

When you didn’t respect this world, it returned the favor.
When you shamed it, it humiliated you in turn.
At the very least, it tried — as long as it could — to defile everything that refused to become just another spare part in the monstrous system that mankind had created (…)