Ambient Poetry

I keep playing with AI, and lately not only for code. More and more I use it for small art pieces too. This one started with a poem I was working on for a while, a symbolic text about life, limits, rules and cracks, and about forms that don't close completely (there is a strange mercy in that, I think).

Somewhere during the work I started to call the result "ambient poetry". The idea is simple. I write the text and shape it so it survives in a musical format, then I write a prompt for the soundscape and let AI do the parts I can't do well yet: clean narration, background music, pacing, atmosphere. For the narrator I recorded my own voice as a basis. The final voice is cleaner and more controlled than my real one would be in English, I am not a native speaker after all. But it still feels connected to me, much more than some random stock voice would.

Honestly, this surprised me. To hear my own text spoken back like this, with a slow ritual soundscape around it, was a bit strange and also moving. It sounds more polished than anything I could produce with my current musical knowledge. Doing it by hand would take me years of voice training, sound design, composition, recording, mixing and failing again and again. I don't complain about that, learning those skills slowly has real value. But it is also interesting to be able to reach the shape of an idea before mastering every craft that is needed to execute it.

For me there is a real tension in this. I still love slow, physical and imperfect media. I wrote about analog photography before, and why it matters to me exactly because it does not allow endless correction. Attention becomes expensive there, it asks for patience. I don't want art to become just prompt, output and consumption.

On the other side, I don't think that rejecting the tool is the only honest position. I use AI in programming already, as a fast assistant for some layers of the work and not as replacement for my own judgment (I wrote about this in AI Copilot in VS Code). Something similar seems possible here. The question is where the center of the work is.

Here the center is still personal. The text comes from my own notes, from the same ideas I keep circling around in other forms: structure and space, limits as part of existence, rules that can open things up instead of only constraining them, and a frame that is strong enough so something wilder can move inside. This is quite close to Rules, Space and Growth and to the difference between fixed goals and living aims. The poem is less explicit than those articles but it's the same current underneath.

The thought itself was already there, what AI added was more like a vessel around it. It made the text more sensory: voice, drone, rhythm, silence, the feeling of a ritual pause. And it was not automatic at all. I needed more than eighty iterations to get close to the atmosphere I had in mind. Many versions were too dramatic or too generic, too fast, too clean, obviously synthetic or they just missed the inner temperature of the piece.

Maybe this is the most interesting part for me. AI did not remove the need for taste, if anything it made it more visible. The work turned into a long loop of listening, rejecting, adjusting and trying again. The machine produces variations very fast, but it can't decide which one feels true. This decision still comes from the same place as any creative decision: attention, patience and some feeling for the moment when a thing starts to breathe.

So here is the final version.