Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems by northern Illinois poets. This poem is by Carol Alfus.
Alfus is a retired teacher, community volunteer, enthusiastic traveler and gardener. Her poetry is informed and inspired by current events, personal memories and the boundless beauty and ingenuity of the natural world. Her first poetry chapbook, I Would Swim in Such a Sky, will be published by Kelsay Books in early 2026. Here’s her poem “Be careful what you ask for: a true story.”
If necessity is the mother of invention,
then curiosity must be the wayward child of bad ideas.
Why else would I create an account on Open AI (using a false name and phone number, no less) and ask Chat GPT to Write a poem in the style of Carol Alfus.
I’d heard about these large language models
insatiably ingesting entire universes
of data from the internet to use in ways
considerably above my pay grade to imagine.
But, really, how much material by a
70-year-old retired teacher/amateur poet is out th--
Oh.
Seconds, mere seconds was all it took
for it/them to scrape me off the internet
like a wad of old chewing gum on the
bottom of a bus stop bench,
and generate a response starting with
“Key Elements in Carol Alfus’ Style”
which, according to it/them, is
“emotionally honest and personal”
as well as “conversational with inviting imagery”.
All of this was followed by the poem it/they composed,
which I will NOT quote here, but let me just say
in the creation of this bit of verse
my work was not only scraped
but sliced and diced and served up
as a Carol Alfus salad, sprinkled with
the topics, themes and even the punctuation
quirks—I do love me a good em dash—
that populate my poems.
It was uncanny—and more than a little creepy—
but, if I’m being honest, not entirely unlike
something I might have written—
if I felt the need to cram most of my
favorite subjects into a single poem.
I suppose I might have felt violated,
but curiosity got the better of me
and I asked for it, didn’t I?
For the record: I hereby attest that the entirety of the above poem—with the exception of those words enclosed in quotation marks—was composed solely by myself without the assistance of artificial intelligence.
~Carol AlfusAugust 18, 2025
