Love in the Time of Chat GPT

I could be funny and clever

Blue in the face, producing love letters

Scratch out words, tear out pages

Fret over improper construction in my phrases

I could document our time together, laboriously

In dedicated confessions to my dear diary

But it’s rather well covered by my Instagram story

I could soliloquize about the colour of your eyes

Tell you they remind me of bright August skies

Find the best adjectives to describe you myself

Without any online dictionary help

I could write you all these words on my own

But I could also have AI-generated them-

And you would never have known

Clara Frey is a 19-year-old English literature student at McGill University and a recent graduate of Dawson College. Her favourite pastimes include writing poems on public transit, battling the urge to use ChatGPT for fear of losing the beauty of the written word and spending money she doesn’t have on plant-milk lattes in independent coffee shops. If you look hard enough you’ll find a cat hair or two on her sweater and she is always hard-pressed to find a matching pair of socks. Clara has worked as a staff writer for Dawson’s student-run newspaper The Plant, and her poetry has been published in the Encore Poetry Anthology and Chouette Literary Magazine.