Your Heart, Her Poem: Crafting Original Poetry with AI
Is using AI to express your emotions artificial?
Using AI to write a personal poem for your daughter. Does that sound impersonal? Or does AI amplify your sincerity and help articulate your feelings?
Using AI isn’t artificial if you do it right. It’s a tool that enhances your ability to capture and express emotions. Your stories, your feelings are the ink that AI uses to draft beautiful prose; it’s your job to make it yours.
Unfortunately, 68% of us cheat with AI.
Here’s how to do it right.
Prompting Your Way to a Personal Poem
In a research study at MIT,1 68% of human participants passed off AI’s work as their own, without modification. This isn’t just cheating; it misses the power of AI. A better way to use AI is like a camera: you decide where to point it, when to press the shutter, how to adjust the scene, and which images to keep.
To write a poem, start by prompting AI with your raw emotions, your “scene.” That is, don’t ask AI to “Write a poem about my daughter”; take some time and think.
For my daughter’s college graduation, I spent a few days reflecting on what makes my daughter special. For Christmas, we both got Snoopy and Woodstock tattoos, so I wrote down, “We’re like Woodstock and Snoopy, on an adventure together.” She loves old people. We both love One Direction. She knits while watching TV.
These ideas are like subjects in a photograph - it’s the raw material.
AI is the Ultimate What-If Engine
Think of AI as a “What If” engine for creative work. These What-If scenarios are like setting the scene for a camera, except you can set it to anything you dream of. You invent the scene, the lighting, and the concepts with your AI prompts.
For example, I fed AI scenes like:
What-If the poem used Woodstock as my daughter and Snoopy as me?
What-If the poem expressed the idea of giving a child “roots and wings.”
What-If the poem was about her graduating from High Point University?
AI had some amazing ideas, but that’s where the work starts. I kept, deleted, rewrote, and reorganized its ideas, including this stanza:
AI can generate hundreds of ideas based on your What-If prompts. I prompted it to write jokes, simplify ideas, use new metaphors, use different styles, or find new rhymes. AI is an active, eager thesaurus, powered by your prompts.
You’re the editor. Like discarding most of your bad pictures, discard most of AI’s ideas until you find the perfect words.
Mixing Modes: What-If We Wrote a Haiku? What-If We Made it Funnier?
AI and I tried a Haiku (after about 10 prompts and passes at editing, I copied my draft into AI and thought: “What-If this was a Haiku?”
Here’s what I got:
The depth of the What-If questions you can ask is infinite. Keep asking, keep prompting, keep editing.
This is a healthy and fun way to use AI.
Is it Artificial?
Using AI isn’t artificial if you use it right.
First, choose your ingredients. Like taking pictures with a camera, you choose your subjects, settings, lighting, and scene.
Treat AI as a “What-If” machine. The quality of your work depends on the quality of your questions.
Always rewrite. Aggressively evaluate AI’s suggestions, discard most, tweak what’s close, and stitch together the pieces that capture your meaning and emotion.
The final piece is all yours, born from your heart, crafted with a 21st-century quill.
Like this? Listen to it as a NotebookLM-generated podcast:
Read my favorite Substacks:
Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence, Shakked Noy, and Whitney Zhang
Poetry is an interesting one to work with. Of all the writing I think people view this one as more personal. The thing is, does it reflect the emotion you want? Does it matter to your daughter how it was formed? Did she like it? If it's next to all those, then I see no issue.