Introduction

These poems are not about artificial intelligence. They are about us. More precisely, they are about what happens to language, labour, education, intimacy and attention when a technology arrives that can imitate all of them and understand none.

I am a poet and a scientist. For a decade I have written poems in response to scientific research, trying to find the places where precision and ambiguity meet. Over that time I have watched the tools we use to communicate get faster, cheaper and emptier. AI is the latest and most disorienting of these, not because it is dangerous in itself, but because it is so good at sounding like it is not a tool at all.

I also run Slow AI, built on a single principle: knowing when to use AI and when to leave it alone. We live in a moment saturated with hype, from people who think it will save the world and people who think it will end it, from oligarchs trying to control it and salespeople profiting from the confusion. None of them are right. The truth is smaller and stranger.

Poetry has always been a slow technology. It asks you to stop, to read a line twice, to stay with an image until it gives up its meaning. These poems are written against the current, standing in it long enough to feel which way it is pulling.

They are not Luddite. I use AI in my own work, and I encourage others to do so critically. They are not predictions. And they are not balanced, because there are already enough people writing breathlessly about the wonders. These poems attend to the seams, the cracks, the places where something does not quite fit.

All of them are written by a human being, slowly, with all the hesitation and second-guessing and crossing-out that implies. That is the point.

Sam Illingworth, Edinburgh, 2025