A Poet's Case Against AI: The Beauty Lives in the Imperfection

Shawn Smucker’s prose poem is a sardonic argument against outsourcing human experience to AI. Framed as ironic advice to “please use AI” for meal planning, trip planning, wedding toasts, and creative work, it catalogs everything lost when a chatbot replaces a phone call to a friend, the labor of writing, or the awkward truth of a parent’s own words. The friend you’d have called knows fly-fishing rivers and is quietly struggling; the toast your machine writes will never carry the weight of the diapers you changed.

The piece lands as a defense of friction itself. Smucker argues that the years of being mediocre, the clumsy first drafts, the long phone calls that wander into a cancer diagnosis or a spring garden lost to frost — these are not inefficiencies to optimize away. They are the substance of a life. The closing image of his daughter asleep on his chest while he sits with regret over unwritten stories reframes imperfection as the natural order rather than a problem AI should solve.

For a technical audience, the essay is worth reading as a counterweight to productivity-framed AI discourse. It doesn’t engage with capability or safety debates; it asks what gets hollowed out when frictionless generation becomes the default for the parts of life that were never supposed to be efficient.