AI Should Never Be Allowed to Read Poetry

That was the joke.

After No Man Is An AI-land — an experiment feeding John Donne’s words into an AI voice, AI-generated imagery, and AI-generated music — a friend offered the perfect response:

“Great graphics, but AI should never be allowed to read poetry.”

Which, naturally, felt less like criticism and more like an instruction.

So I fed that back in.

This time the poem itself was written by AI:

AI Should Never Be Allowed to Read Poetry

And then the same process repeated.

The poem became voice.

The poem became image.

The poem became sound.

Same source.

Different readings.

Or misreadings.

That’s the interesting thing about these systems. They don’t simply reproduce. They interpret — in their own strange, statistical way. They smooth rough edges, amplify patterns, invent correspondences.

Sometimes (often) they flatten meaning.

Sometimes (often) they reveal something unexpected.

What emerges can feel less like translation and more like mutation.

Is that mutation the art?

I’m starting to gather these experiments under a new heading:

hAIF unusuaL (see what I did there?! 😁)

A loose collection of works exploring what happens when human and machine imagination overlap — poems, paintings, philosophy, loops, symbols — all passing through different generative systems and returning changed.

Some of these experiments reach backwards:

like bringing Dali's Metamorphosis of Narcissus into motion.

Some reach sideways:

like trying to render Buddhist philosophy as audiovisual process.

And some, like this latest pair, fold back into themselves:

a human poem read by machines,

then a machine poem reflecting on its own reading.

A kind of recursive bell.

Not because AI should be allowed to read poetry.

But because its misunderstandings might tell us something about how meaning survives translation — and perhaps how we misunderstand each other too.

Watch the latest piece ... (or as a short) ...

And the earlier companion piece, No Man Is An AI-land

There's also a new YouTube Playlist, bringing a few strands together 😊