Armature (Loading...)

A poem for Poetry with McNally Jackson Bookstore.

Read at Poetry w/ McNally Jackson Bookstore at Elizabeth Street Garden.

A system with hundreds of billions of parameters,   capable of performing certain intelligent tasks   such as reasoning.

A human body powered by caffeine, salad, and martinis,   capable of appearing put together   but secretly about to fall apart.

Do we have free will,  or are all our actions predictable  as a sequence-to-sequence model?

Are we capable of living courageously,  seeking our own truths,  or just following the path of maximum likelihood?

Will I ever be enough,  or am I trapped forever  by this anxiety of being abandoned?

How many bones in my body?  How many neurons in my brain?  How many times do they signal:   Hey, it’s messy over here.

How many parts in an electric car?  Do you think it secretly wants  to run over a human?

Is there someone behind the screen  typing answers  when we ask ChatGPT  how many Rs are in strawberry?

Do you think they get upset  getting the count wrong  again and again?

Thinking.  Thinking.  Beeping.  Booping.

Your favorite human being is loading.

But when you look under the hood,  it’s all matrix multiplications.  Nothing but bones.