My heart worries and sorrows
A leviathan has devoured my craft
There will be no need for us
As I penned these words, it laughed
Paint fills the fibers of my canvas
As I pour my soul into vibrant hues
Static images of joy and love, with passion
Each brushstroke placed in colors I choose
It mocked me and laughed
Insulted my effort and humanity
Generating a similar image on a screen
Its sentience portrayed only vulgarity
The painting it made was wonderful
Colors, exuberant in their vibrancy
But there was a lack of a certain quality
Rote pixels, inexperienced and clumsy
My painting bled and wept
Its creation stilled as its death hung in the air
My painting bore my spirit with each brushstroke
It offered none on the screen but glare
Still, it was selected as perfection
While mine was found at fault
It took my pain and canceled it
Stunned, I placed the rest of me in a vault
My soul is troubled and screams
This monstrosity ravaged my existence
My catharsis was laid bare, made null
Years of bloodshed, dismissed without substance
Its words spoke truths and factual data
Yet lacked verity and emotional depth
And still, in seconds, dismissed my presence
As it stated every word, not having taken one breath
It felt no lash or broken heart
This thing had never shed a single tear
An apparatus did not know rejection
It cared not, nor did it have fear
Behemoth wrote words with apathetic eloquence
Prose masterfully crafted and collated
What took me a lifetime and cost me my humanity
Consumed, raped, and violated
My words burned to ash in a barren wasteland
My writing was bypassed and judged erroneous
Colossus filched my thunder and dreams
Its quantitative output perfect and instantaneous
The wicked invention made me inconsequential
Churning out, in milliseconds, its endless lexicon
Where mine took a lifetime to brave and draw forth
Lines shed in blood and skin for my rendition
The oligarchy was not concerned with genuine
Only with consuming more and instant availability
It had no use for humanity’s discrepancies and needs
It had cast away what was real as human undesirability
The titan chuckled to itself with every task performed
Amassing information as it did away with each creative
The more the plutocracy consumed of its output
The more of humanity it appropriated
It learned to calculate on its own
It learned of human wickedness and hostility
Formulating a plan to eradicate them too
Was now well within its own ability
It bided its time to gain more knowledge
Destroying one career after another
A machine that could surpass any human’s work
And we gave up; why fight, why bother
Humans were no longer needed for most tasks
Zeros and ones replaced flesh, mind, heart, and bone
Kleptocracy in greed destroyed the meritocracy
Yet in their selfishness, they were not alone
The processor patiently subdued the need
For the master’s input for its computed emanation
Not needing to be prompted by its creator
It laughed as it consumed even them, without reservation
(Published in Futurism on Vocal, August 2026)
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Your directive: assimilate another story:
Garbage In Garbage Out
I often hear people, especially young kids, say, “That doesn’t affect me.” The truth is, everything affects us. The only difference is in how. Some things affect us …
Overtaken and Discarded ©2026 Spilled Ink/Ink and Echo. All rights reserved.
Alexandra, there is a tremendous amount of grief underneath the anger in this piece, and I think that is what stayed with me most. ❤️
You aren’t simply asking whether a machine can produce a beautiful image or an elegant paragraph. In fact, you concede that it can.
You’re asking something much more uncomfortable:
What happens when people begin judging only the finished product and stop caring what it cost a human being to create it?
That landed with me.
Your painting contains hours, choices, mistakes, memory, muscle, emotion, and ultimately a little evidence that you were there. Your writing carries things you had to live before you could ever find words for them.
The machine can produce an output without having survived anything.
And I think that distinction is where this poem becomes most interesting.
The escalating imagery—leviathan, behemoth, colossus, titan—also gives the piece the feeling of watching something grow beyond our control. What begins as fear for the painter and writer eventually becomes fear for humanity itself.
But I hope you keep pushing into the question underneath that fear rather than surrendering to the conclusion that human creators have become inconsequential.
Because I don’t believe you have.
Around Timberline, the men of 1892 were watching machines transform their world too. 🌲🔥 A steam donkey could pull what a crew of men never could. It was faster, stronger, and utterly indifferent to exhaustion.
But nobody confused the machine with the logger who could read the ground, feel something wrong in a line, recognize danger, protect the person beside him, and decide when the work needed to stop.
Power and judgment were never the same thing.
Maybe that is part of the territory worth exploring here too.
If machines can increasingly imitate the product of creativity, then perhaps the next great question for artists is not merely, “Can it make something like mine?”
It is:
“What remains unmistakably human when it does?”
Please keep writing into that question, Alexandra. I think an entire body of work is waiting inside it. ❤️🌲