A Poem About AI Hit 13 Million People Right in the Chest. Here's Why It Matters.
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
A bookshop owner from Pennsylvania accidentally wrote the most honest thing about AI anyone has said all year.
Shawn Smucker wasn't trying to go viral. He was just feeling something.
The poet, novelist, and co-owner of Nooks bookstore in Lancaster, PA, had been sitting with an idea for a few weeks — something about AI, about efficiency, about the slow erosion of the moments that make life feel real. He wrote it down. Posted it to his Substack. Got some warm responses from his small but loyal readership. Called it good.
Then a popular poetry account reposted it on Instagram, and the internet lost its mind.
In seven days, his poem "Please Use AI" was liked 670,000 times and seen by 13 million people. Fans showed up at his bookstore just to talk to him about it. His phone wouldn't stop. He had to remove Instagram from his phone and take his own advice — put the device down and go be with his family.
The poem hit something. The question is: what, exactly?
What the Poem Actually Says
The title is a trap. You click expecting a tech bro manifesto. What you get is one of the sharpest pieces of writing about modern loneliness published this year.
Smucker's poem is structured as a series of sardonic instructions. Be sure to use AI when making your next meal plan — because if you call your friend who loves to cook, you might end up talking for longer than you planned. You might hear about her father's cancer diagnosis. Her loneliness. The spring garden she planted and lost to an early frost.
Use AI to plan that last camping trip with your kid before they leave home — because if you text your outdoorsy friend for trail recommendations, you might end up meeting for a beer and hearing how he's been blacking out drunk every night, and that's a lot more complicated than a trail map.
Use AI to write the toast at your kid's wedding — because no one wants your words. The poorly-written, clumsy, lived-in words of a parent who changed hundreds of diapers and fed them in the middle of the night and cried when they were late home because you were positive they were dead. No one wants that. The sterile words of a machine that never lived, never felt the pain of a miscarriage or the joy of a friendship restored — surely that's better.
The poem ends quietly. The speaker, in his 50th year, youngest daughter asleep on his chest, arm going numb — and he will not move. Will not disturb this. Sighing about stories he tried to write that never landed the way they felt in his mind.
But isn't that, my flesh-and-blood friend, the natural order of things?
The longing for something that could always be a bit better. The way anything worth doing feels clumsy and painful at first. The beauty found in all of these subtle imperfections.
Why 13 Million People Felt It
Smucker told Gazetteer SF after going viral: "AI's not going to break your heart the way real life does."
That's the whole thing right there.
The poem isn't a Luddite manifesto. It's not arguing that AI is evil, or that technology is destroying us, or that we were all better off in some pre-internet golden age (we weren't). What it's pointing at is subtler and more uncomfortable: the quiet replacement of friction.
We live in a culture that has decided, more or less collectively, that friction is the enemy.
Efficiency is the goal. Every product, every platform, every AI assistant is optimized to remove the awkward pauses, the unexpected conversations, the moments where you call someone for a recipe and end up talking for two hours about things that actually matter.
That optimization is genuinely useful. It's also genuinely costly. And the cost is hard to see because it doesn't show up anywhere on a dashboard.
You don't get a notification that says: You avoided a meaningful conversation today. Your friend is still lonely.
The poem makes that invisible cost visible. And 13 million people recognized it, immediately, because they've all been on both sides of it — the person who used the app instead of calling, and the person who didn't get the call.
The Criticism (It's Not Wrong)
Not everyone loved it. On MetaFilter, commenters pushed back hard. The most pointed critique: most people weren't calling their friends for meal plan advice before AI either. They were Googling it. So is this really about AI, or is it just nostalgia for a human intimacy that was already eroding long before ChatGPT?
It's a fair point. The poem can be read as blaming AI for a loneliness epidemic that predates AI by decades — one that social media, smartphones, urbanization, and a hundred other forces helped create. Smucker is aiming at the newest culprit in a much older story.
But the best poems aren't policy papers. They're not trying to identify root causes or assign precise blame. They're trying to name a feeling. And the feeling Smucker named — the sense that we keep finding new, frictionless ways to route around each other — is real and getting more real, not less.
AI is the latest and most powerful version of that routing. That's what makes the poem land now.
The Stanza About the Planet
Here's the part of the conversation that doesn't get written.
Smucker's poem is about what AI costs us in human connection. That's important. But there's another cost — quieter, less poetic, more existential — that runs beneath all of it.
The servers running your AI model have been burning coal in the dark this whole time. Not in your memory. Not in anyone's garden. Just heat, rising, invisibly, every time you type a prompt.
A single AI data center can use as much water as a small city. The electricity powering a large language model query comes, in much of the world, from fossil fuel infrastructure. The carbon footprint of the AI industry is growing fast — and unlike the human cost Smucker writes about, it doesn't have a face. It doesn't call you. It doesn't show up at a bookstore to talk.
This isn't an argument against AI. It's the same argument Smucker is making, extended: don't outsource the things that matter. And a livable planet matters.
The good news is that this one is solvable. AI running on renewable energy, on hardware optimized for efficiency, built by companies whose mission actually aligns with the planet's long-term survival — that's not a fantasy. It's a choice being made right now, by the companies building these tools.
At Viro AI, every query you send funds renewable energy projects and climate restoration. Not because it's a good PR line, but because it's the only version of this technology we believe in building. The human moments Smucker is mourning are worth preserving. So is the world those moments happen in.
What We Actually Want From AI
Smucker said something in his post-viral interview that stuck with us: he didn't write the poem as an anti-AI screed. He uses AI. He's not against the technology. He's against using it as a substitute for the parts of life that can't be optimized.
That's a distinction worth sitting with.
Use AI to draft the email you don't have time to write. Use it to research the camping trail so you can spend the actual trip on the trail. Use it to transcribe your notes so your hands are free for the things your hands are actually for.
But write your own toast. Call your friend for the recipe. Let the conversation run long. Let your arm fall asleep.
The clumsy, inefficient, slightly broken version of the moment is the version you'll remember. The AI-generated version is the version that feels fine and leaves no trace.
Smucker ends his poem with a question: isn't that the natural order of things? The longing for better. The clumsy pain of things worth doing. The beauty in the imperfections.
Yeah. It is. And no model, however good, has ever felt that.
Viro AI is the anti-Big Tech AI assistant. We fund renewable energy and climate restoration with every query — because we think the future should be worth living in.
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