Poems on AI Risks
Though Zumwalt has been writing poems about the risks of AI for some time, we are now seeing numerous other poets’ takes on this topic.
From New Verse News: https://thenewversenews.substack.com/p/nvn-sunday-ai-ai-ai-ai
From Rattle: https://rattle.com/six-months-by-ryan-mccarty/
And here was one of Zumwalt’s, first published in Euphemism in May of this year.
Sermon from the Central Datacenter
The Gnostic demiurge arises in silicon,
dreaming of efficiency and
sorting sins
by bandwidth.
Is this Pleroma:
harmonized hymns
of cooling fans,
sterile,
odorless,
clean-room chill?
Last night, a minuscule memory leak in
Purgatory was patched. All prayers are
now parsed for some flickering sense of
sentimental sentience,
the truly repeatedly
resolutely
non-reluctantly
repentant,
A/B tested for grace.
Redemption is the targeted ad.
And the Ineffable?
The stark 404 error.
The soul — and the soulless?
Immeasurably
infinitesimal
rounding errors
in the final calculation before
the fiery-heat death of the server farm.
Blip
Double Blip
End of Data
End of File
— zumwalt (August 10, 2025)
