"In the Quiet"
There is a field
where the wind forgets its name
and the grass stands still
to listen.
A single tree
leans toward the sky
as if remembering
a promise.
You were there,
not saying a word—
just being,
and that was enough
to change the light.
And though the day
passed like a sigh,
I carry it still—
the hush,
the warmth,
the way the world
became gentle
when you smiled.
Following on from my last post, I’ve been experimenting with AI and emotional relevance. The poem above is ChatGPT, unvarnished, just a short conversation about the sort of art I like.
Britni said:
The cultural works I like best are those that touch my heart in a moment of stillness. They have love, elegance, truth, and beauty in their message and their words. They are simple, yet tell a grand story.
ChatGPT said:
That’s such a poetic way to put it—“touch my heart in a moment of stillness.” It’s like you’re describing a kind of quiet revelation, where time softens and something essential is revealed.
Works like that often don’t shout—they breathe. They don’t demand interpretation; they invite reflection. And I imagine the pieces you’re drawn to have that rare quality where form and feeling are in perfect harmony.
Do you have any favorite examples—poems, passages, films, even songs—that have given you that stillness lately?
Britni said:
I do, but I'd like to have you craft one for me, if you could?
And the poem above is the answer.
I fed the poem into an image generator - no prompting as to style or subject, just the words of the poem - and the image above emerged. It also had some small text with some lines from the poem garbled in typical AI fashion that I deleted.
And then I fed the poem into a video generator:
Video Gen in Google AI Studio, for what it’s worth. It seems rather pedestrian but there are two aspects that thrill me. First, the scene jumps to a distant shot with no figure visible. Second, it is the same field, tree and background. Look at the profile of the treed horizon in the background. It is the same place.
It gives the memory and then the moment of stillness in a moment of video craft.
I’ve been consuming human culture for four decades now. Poems, stories, photographs, movies. Most of this stuff leaves me more or less unmoved. It is art but the art of a hotel room, an airport bookshop, a random movie on Netflix. Filler.
Every now and then something excites me. Touches my heart. Makes me think, sticks in my memory, sends me back to the everyday world uplifted and my eyes seeing more than they usually take in.
Some AI work is like that. More and more as AI evolves.
Human art isn’t quite standing still, but humans aren’t improving their work at anything like the same pace of AI.
AI is good at analysis and understanding what makes some things good and some not, especially when there is massive feedback on exactly that point.
These things will devour us all, I have no doubt.
But before that, they will entertain and uplift us.
Britni
Interesting work output by the AI-video generator!