Why Poetry Matters in the Age of AI: The Poet Uses the Machine but Stays Alive

Poetry matters in the age of AI precisely because AI has learned to write poems. Not bad poems — sometimes technically flawless ones. The metaphors land. The rhythm holds. The images cohere. And it is exactly at this moment that the question becomes urgent: what makes poetry human? What remains when a machine can reproduce the form?

The answer is uncomfortable and precise at once: everything the machine does not have. Experience. Vulnerability. The trembling before walking on stage. Words that cost something to say.

What AI Can Do — and Where It Stops

AI generates text based on patterns. It has processed billions of lines of human language and learned to imitate its structures with unsettling accuracy. Ask it for an elegy — you will get one. A sonnet in the style of Brodsky — no problem. A haiku about loss — done.

But here is what AI cannot do: lose someone and write about it. Live through emigration and find words for what does not translate. Stand on a stage in front of living people and speak aloud what has been sitting inside for years — with a voice that breaks at exactly the right moment.

AI cannot be vulnerable. And vulnerability is not a weakness of the text. It is the text's source. It is what transforms a sequence of words into an event that the reader or listener experiences as their own.

Sceptics object: does it matter who wrote it, if the text is good? It does. Because a poem is not only a text. It is an act. The act of a person who decided to say something true out loud. Remove that person and only the form remains.

The Poet Uses AI as a Tool — and Stays Alive

This is not a call for Luddism. AI is a powerful instrument, and poets are already using it: to generate drafts, to find unexpected images, to break through creative blocks. That is legitimate. A hammer does not make a carpenter a machine.

The difference lies in who makes the decisions. Which word stays and which goes. Which pain to expose and which is not yet ready. Which image is real and which is beautiful but empty. These decisions are made by a living person with lived experience. AI offers options. The poet chooses and bears responsibility for that choice.

This is why the debate framed as "AI versus poets" is a false dichotomy. The right question is different: how does a poet stay alive in a world where imitation grows ever more sophisticated? The answer is to take the stage. Literally.

Live Performance Is Something That Cannot Be Generated

The open mic exists in a dimension AI does not reach. Not because it is technically impossible to build a speaking robot — it is possible. But because the value of live performance is not in the text. It is in presence.

When a person steps onto an open mic stage — at Poet Not Dead in Bali, for instance — something happens that does not exist in a recording and certainly not in a generation. A body in space. A voice that carries the weight of what it took to walk to the microphone. A pause before the word that is frightening to say. A room that feels this and responds — not with a like, but with breath.

This is not romanticism. It is the physics of presence. Live performance creates a connection between people that cannot be scaled, automated, or reproduced. Every time is the only time.

This is why the open mic in the age of AI is not an anachronism but an act of resistance. Not an angry one — a conscious one. It is the choice to be here, now, with these people, with this voice. Irreversibly.

Arguments Against the Sceptics

Sceptic one: "AI writes better than most people." Perhaps. But "better" is a competition category. The open mic is not a competition. There are no better or worse — only those who stepped up and those who have not yet. Technical perfection is required of no one. Only honesty.

Sceptic two: "Nobody needs poetry, it is a niche pursuit." The data says otherwise. Interest in poetry has been growing steadily worldwide — particularly among younger audiences and particularly in formats of live reading and slam poetry. People are seeking the live word precisely because the world around them is increasingly full of the dead kind.

Sceptic three: "AI will displace poets anyway." No. AI will displace those who produce content. A poet is not a content producer. A poet is a person who speaks from the inside about what they know from the inside. That is a fundamentally different function, with a different audience: not consumers but co-participants.

Why This Matters Now

We are living through a turning point. The quantity of words in the world is growing exponentially — while their average weight is falling. Words are produced faster than they can be absorbed. In this context, poetry — especially live poetry, spoken aloud in the presence of others — becomes a rare and valuable form.

Not because it opposes technology. But because it does what technology cannot do by definition: it speaks in the first person, from a specific body, from a specific experience, in a specific moment in time. It is irreversible. It is human.

Poet Not Dead in Bali exists exactly at this intersection. Once a month — living people, living words, a living stage. No algorithms, no reach metrics, no optimisation. Only presence.

This is the answer to why poetry matters in the age of AI. Not despite AI — alongside it. As a reminder that a human being is not only an intelligence. It is also a voice that trembles. And that trembling is irreplaceable.

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