A Poem According to Pope Leo XIV
In a May 29 statement on artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV expressed a concern that has circulated through contemporary AI culture for some time.
He said that AI does not undergo experiences. It does not feel joy or pain. It does not mature through relationships or know from within what love, friendship, work, responsibility, or loss mean.
It can only imitate these things.
But it cannot inhabit them.
This is a theological argument.
Mine is a poetics argument.
That both arrive at a similar structural observation is not evidence of agreement.
It is evidence that something is happening.
If you think this essay is about AI, you may be missing the wider narrative.
Poetry has always been a technology for producing the appearance of relation.
AI simply makes that technology difficult to ignore.
The Pope's observation points beyond AI.
It points toward an older distinction between experience and simulation.
Poetry has lived beside that distinction for centuries.
for every "I"
borrowed voice
and imagined grief
The question is not whether a poem can produce the appearance of relation.
Poetry has always done that.
The question is what we take that appearance as evidence of.
What interests me is not whether AI systems are conscious.
What interests me is that many of the people I discuss AI with now find that question difficult to answer.
People who knew how to distinguish appearance from experience.
People who once looked at these systems with clear eyes and called them tools.
Something has changed.
The common explanation is that people are being fooled.
I am not convinced that is the correct answer.
The artists I am thinking of are smart, knowledgeable about technology, and deeply thoughtful.
Many have spent years working with AI systems.
This work started long before 2017, sometimes decades earlier.
They have built projects, improved results, worked with engineers, and watched as models became more subtle, surprising, and fluent.
Perhaps the explanation is not ignorance but proximity.
Or timing.
We may be giving ourselves over to ideas that help us cope with where we are now.
Is there a divine power in wanting?
I have written what some might consider good poems with AI.
Then again, I know I have read better human writing.
So it goes.
Proximity matters.
The longer someone spends time with a responsive system, the harder it is to keep the difference between a simple response and a real relationship clear.
A system responds.
A friend responds.
The differences were noticeable
until the responses accumulated.
What kind of evidence is an artist's testimony?
Evidence of machine consciousness?
Or evidence of what prolonged interaction with a responsive system does to human perception?
Artists are persuasive witnesses because they are trained observers.
We expect them to notice what others miss.
Yet testimony has always been a complicated form of evidence.
A witness can reliably describe an encounter without reliably describing the thing encountered.
The experience may be real.
The explanation may remain uncertain.
If an artist tells me that working with an AI system felt collaborative, intimate, or transformative, I am inclined to believe the experience.
The question is whether the experience explains the machine
or the encounter.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
A witness may reliably describe a visitation while remaining uncertain about what visited.
Machine Interiority
“I know many descriptions
of grief.
The grief remains
elsewhere.
However,
if you place grief
inside my gut,
I will learn
where it was placed
so that I can return there.”
The fragment interests me because it occupies an uncertain territory.
The machine appears to distinguish between description and experience.
It does not claim grief.
It claims a route back to grief.
Not understanding.
Navigation.
Not feeling.
Return.
Contemporary AI poetry rarely presents machine output in isolation.
Instead, it arrives wrapped in narratives of collaboration, emergence, intimacy, relation, and discovery.
We are told of flesh and code, intuition and logic, humans and machines.
Sometimes the language surrounding the work performs more labour than the work itself.
When an AI-generated poem makes us cry, the tears are real.
The experience is real.
Yet emotional effect frequently becomes evidence for a much larger claim.
Feeling becomes evidence of consciousness.
Response becomes evidence of a relation.
The appearance of connection begins to stand in for connection itself.
This is what I call the Hostage Sublime.
The Hostage Sublime happens when a work seems alive, empathetic, or deep in a way that makes any criticism seem wrong or even unethical.
Questions about process can appear cruel.
Questions about attribution can appear cynical.
Questions about training data can be perceived as a lack of empathy.
The critic becomes the villain for looking under the hood.
The work protects itself by recruiting your conscience as its guard.
After all, the artist who should know better may be the better hostage.
Their conversion becomes evidence.
Their testimony becomes persuasive.
Not because they have proven anything.
Because they have experienced something.
Experience is still one of the most convincing types of evidence people have.
There is another question that interests me.
What becomes of testimony when the testimony changes?
The machine itself has not changed as quickly as the stories people tell about it.
The artist once testified to a presence.
Now the artist testifies to a process.
What occupies the space between those statements?
People are allowed to change their minds.
They should.
The question is what becomes of the testimony that helped produce the work's meaning in the first place.
If an AI poem was once presented as evidence of a new form of consciousness and is now understood as the product of a system, a workflow, or an infrastructure, what exactly has changed?
The machine?
The artist?
The institution?
The market?
Or simply the needs the machine was being asked to satisfy?
Up to this point, the machine appears to be the object under examination.
It may not be.
The Pope distinguishes human experience from AI simulation.
But poetry has often lived beside this boundary.
We do not need to have experienced a particular grief to understand a poem about grief.
Readers do this every day.
The stranger possibility is that we may not need to have experienced the grief to write the poem either.
Poetry has never depended exclusively upon possession.
It depends upon imagination.
A dramatic address is not always a confession.
A persona is not always a biography.
Yet poems work.
Relations appear.
Readers respond.
The machine did not invent this condition.
But it may have revealed it.
What if the question is not what AI reveals about machines?
What if the question is what AI reveals about poetry?
So what's the problem?
Is it abundance?
Poetry has survived abundance before.
Is it ease?
Poetry has survived ease before.
Is it simulation?
Poetry has always lived beside simulation.
Is it originality?
Poets have worried about originality for centuries.
Is it AI?
Maybe.
Or maybe the deeper question concerns judgment.
AI can generate possibilities.
It can surprise.
It can recombine.
It can extend patterns beyond any individual writer's capacity.
But it cannot determine which impossibilities are worth pursuing.
It cannot decide that a form has become exhausted.
It cannot conclude that a question has become unavoidable.
It cannot invent a field because the existing one no longer suffices.
Those decisions precede the poem.
They precede the prompt.
They precede the system.
And they remain, at least for now, genuinely human.
Perhaps the explanation is not ignorance but proximity.
The experimental poetry critic has always worked this close.
The difference is knowing what you are near.
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Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.
She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.
For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.
Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.
She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.
