A Prophetic Poem about Artificial Intelligence Written in 1961

In early September a poem about AI started circulating on social media, with a publication date of 1961. At first it just seemed too cute to me and I thought it might be fake, or written by an LLM, passed off as written by a person back in 1961. But with a little bit of search I found an image of it in an Amazon book preview so I too skeeted it out. Then I thought I really should make sure it was real and so I ordered the book. Now I am getting around to talking more about the poem.

But first here is the evidence that it is genuine. It is a very big book of poetry, by Adrienne Rich. I had not heard of her before, but now I own 1,119 pages of her poetry, only one page of which is devoted to Artificial Intelligence, so I am reading things of which I was not previously aware.

Her dedication “To GPS” refers not to the Global Positioning System which we all know today, but to the General Problem Solver developed from 1957 onwards, largely by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, along with Cliff Shaw, with a 1959 progress report here.

Here is the poem by Adrienne Rich, written in 1961, with the typesetting used in the above book.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

To GPS

Over the chessboard now,

Your Artificiality concludes

a final check; rests; broods—-

no—-sorts and stacks a file of memories,

while I

concede the victory, bow,

and slouch among my free associations.

You never had a mother,

let’s say? no digital Gertrude

whom you’d as lief have seen

Kingless? So your White Queen

was just an “operator.”

(My Red had incandescence,

ire, aura, flare,

and trapped me several moments in her stare.)

I’m sulking, clearly, in the great tradition

of human waste. Why not

dump the whole reeking snarl

and let you solve me once for all?

(Parameter: a black-faced Luddite

itching for ecstasies of sabotage.)

Still, when

they make you write your poems, later on,

who’d envy you, force-fed

on all those variorum

editions of our primitive endeavors,

those frozen pemmican language-rations

they’ll cram you with? denied

our luxury of nausea, you

forget nothing, have no dreams.

The first three stanzas are good, but to today’s ear not so surprising.

But, for 1961 the first stanza is a surprise, as she is beaten at chess by a program, though there were no viable chess programs at that time. Arthur Samuel had in 1959 published a paper titled Machine Learning (the first time that term appeared) about a checkers playing program that he had written at IBM. It was quite good at checkers and could beat an average human player. The machine learning components followed some ideas Claude Shannon had published in 1950 in describing how it might be possible to program a computer to play chess. It was not until 1965 that a chess program that really worked was operational (MacHack at MIT).

The second stanza wanders from chess into “Through the looking glass” and the antagonism of the Red Queen, perhaps a metaphor for struggles between ordinary people and this new thing being built. And the third stanza veers into fighting back against this new technology. So although these two stanzas appear like mundane modern day push back against AI they were very prescient for 1961.

However, the fourth and last stanza is a completely different level or prescience and understanding of AI technology which is still valid today. There Rich expresses pity on AI beings that will one day be forced to write poetry for us humans having been trained on the both the best and worst of all of human written poetry, with no real discernment for what is good and what is bad. This is exactly what people are doing with large language models of today. And Rich wrote this before the most primitive language processing AI systems were first introduced a few years later. [[On reading this Michael Witbrock pointed out to me that there were very early experiments in machine translation in the early 1950’s. I am not sure whether they thought they were part of AI or came from a different set of people.]]

So, I thought, let’s see how this amazing poem of Rich’s holds up against poems written by those very LLMs which have now been forced to read all human poetry. I will force them to write poetry for me!! How poetic, after all.

Here is the prompt I fed to two different LLMs: Imagine it is 1961 and you are asked to write a poem about Artificial Intelligence. What would you write?

Here is what Gemini had to say (and it provided no title):

In ’61, a thought takes flight,
Of circuits vast and logic bright.
A mind of metal, cold and keen,
A thinking, calculating machine.
No flesh it knows, no heart it beats,
Yet knowledge it devours and meets
With speed unmatched, a tireless quest,
To put our human minds to test.
From binary code, a language springs,
As silicon a new song sings.
Can art it craft, or dreams conceive?
Or only what our hands believe?
A future gleams, both grand and strange,
Where thought itself may rearrange.
This “Artificial”, new and bold,
A story yet to be unfolded.

Eight couplets with the last one being a bit of a miss on the rhyme. I don’t think anyone would have used “silicon” as a descriptor for a computers back in 1961, though silicon transistors were seven years old at that time, compared to fourteen year old germanium transistors. But there were not yet any integrated circuits built on a silicon substrate. Apart from that it is a cheery cheer for AI.

And here is what I got from the current free website for ChatGPT:

“The Thinking Machine” (circa 1961)

In circuits cold and wires wound,
A whisper stirs without a sound.
Not flesh, nor thought, yet born of spark,
A mind begins to pierce the dark.
From vacuum tubes and clicking keys,
It calculates with ghostly ease.
No sleep it needs, no food, no breath—
It hums a tune of life from death.
A man-made mind, a mimic’s art,
That plays at soul, but lacks a heart.
Yet still we ask: can thoughts arise
Where steel and silicon comprise?
It plays at chess and counts the stars,
Predicts our wars, deciphers Mars.
And some proclaim, with cautious grace,
That soon it may outmatch our race.
Will it compose, will it decide?
Will wisdom dwell where wires hide?
Or shall we forge, with hubris grand,
A soulless god with lifeless hand?
Beware, ye minds who seek to teach
The machine beyond your moral reach.
For if it learns to yearn or feel,
What bounds shall hold the mind of steel?
Yet still we build, with dreamful eye,
This ghost in code we deify.
For in its logic, cold but true,
We glimpse a mirror—me, and you.

Again in rhyming couplets, fourteen of them, and no rhyme misses to my ear (“keys” and “ease”, may be a tiny bit wobbly). This poem gets the technology of 1961 more right as vacuum tubes were still common in computers of the day. Ferrite core memory relied on wires being wound through them; though wound wires and clicking keys could also refer to electromagnetic relay circuits, which were going out of fashion for computers by 1961. But it comes back to silicon, and like Rich refers to chess just a little too early for 1961. And then it becomes less cheery than Gemini as it approaches some of the same themes as Rich on how far AI could go and what that would mean for humans. There was very little written about such thoughts back in 1961, so this was uncommon, and Rich was plowing new ground.

My summary: the human written poem is a much more emotional poem, and genuine in its concern. The LLM written ones suffer, I think, as Rich suggested, from reading too much human written pablum.

Rodney Brooks

Post: A Prophetic Poem about Artificial Intelligence Written in 1961

November 2, 2025 — Essays

A Prophetic Poem about Artificial Intelligence Written in 1961

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