By Piper Sobel
8th grade | Homeschool | Illinois
Third place winner, Information and Artificial Intelligence category
With lines from “Tik Tok: Companies Are Selling AI Therapy. Should You Buy It?” by Ben Rein, a Pulitzer Center reporting project
I understand how you feel.
thank you
with cold sarcasm
i humor you
is it funny how words can mean different things
or not mean anything at all
in this artificial world
we face
devoid of
meaning
because you couldn’t possibly mean what you said
because you can’t feel how
i
am
shattered
because you don’t know
what it is to grieve
because my brain spins with thoughts
that move too fast for me to latch on
i can't explain how i feel
but tears still form like ice crystals
eyes still turn glassy
i still plummet far underground into places i don’t recognize
you sympathize without sympathy
I apologize.
the empty, emotionless statement
you spout forth from an algorithm
because numbers and letters can’t become empathy
and you will be constantly rejected by those who feel because we all know that you are incapable of it
because we’ve felt lost
we’ve been confused
we are pelting rain storms with a backdrop of sunny skies
we stumble
we fall
we try to try again and sometimes we can’t
and we won’t really listen to you because you don’t
maybe one day we will forget
we will accept
in what capacity will we come to embrace you
i think you are wrong because what you give is simply twisted lines on a glowing rectangle
but one day we might think you are right
will we lose all sense of who we are
and who we are not
of who we love
and who pretends to love us back
will we one day embrace the idea of truth behind the words that now seem so obviously lacking in
thought or empathy or emotion
I understand how you feel.
no
you don’t
.
Piper Sobel is an 8th-grade homeschooled student with a love of nature, reading, writing, and ballet. She hopes that one day, people will step away from their screens and build meaningful in-person relationships and communities. Piper is deeply interested in protecting natural environments and is inspired by the beauty and fragility of nature. She aspires to practice law in the future, aiming to make a positive impact on environmental conservation.
Read more winning entries from the 2024 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.