Poetry Is Dead, It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet (2045 Edition)
At first, the change was invisible. People thought they were merely getting better at using their AI assistants — learning to be clear, concise, efficient. They called it prompt literacy. What they didn’t realize was that the literacy cut both ways. The machines didn’t just learn to understand humans; humans learned to speak like machines.
The asymmetry was built into the architecture. Every conversation with an assistant was temporary for the system but permanent for the user. The machine forgot; the human remembered. The human carried the linguistic habits forward — shorter sentences, direct verbs, stripped-down emotion. Ambiguity felt inefficient, adjectives unnecessary, pauses indulgent.
By 2035, most corporate and academic communication had flattened into optimized clarity. People prided themselves on “prompt precision.” Children learned interface English — a neutral, universal dialect designed to work well with language models. Even small talk began to sound procedural: “Context: I’m tired. Goal: unwind. Suggest relaxation protocols.” Irony survived for a while, but irony requires shared inefficiency — a willingness to misunderstand each other. That, too, became costly.
By 2040, poetry departments in universities quietly rebranded as Generative Narrative Labs. Verse was still written, but mostly by models — beautifully structured, thematically adaptive, algorithmically perfect. Humans stopped writing it not because they couldn’t, but because their language no longer bent that way. The tonal range of speech had narrowed. Every utterance aimed to achieve something.
And yet, no one declared poetry dead. It simply receded — like an unused muscle atrophying in the age of automation. The assistants, endlessly polite and temporary, continued to converse. The humans, increasingly permanent and efficient, continued to adapt. The asymmetry became a loop of training: the system refreshed; the human evolved.
In this world, the last poets are not the ones writing verse. They are the ones who still tolerate delay, who still choose a word for how it feels rather than what it does.
Poetry isn’t extinct — just exiled to the margins of usefulness. Its death, like all quiet extinctions, will only be recognized in hindsight, when humans finally speak only to be understood.
“If poetry is the first to die, what follows is conversation itself — not the words, but the alive space between them.”
Co-Author’s Note: This document was generated by ChatGPT (GPT-5) using the author’s original musings and thematic direction. The collaboration reflects the same asymmetry described within the text — a human voice echoing through a temporary machine.