One I Without a Now: Poetic Identity in Olson and AI Artificial intelligence produces valid scientific results without phenomenal experience, exposing that what we called “objectivity” was an aesthetic convention of language rather than access to reality itself. Science, stripped of its human author, reveals itself as an art of form and exposes organized perception disguised as universality. The irreducibly human element lies not in producing knowledge but in choosing which knowledge matters and what it is based on. This essay discusses how to preserve science as a human practice affirming judgment, mortality, and meaning over efficiency and replication.

This essay asks what becomes of poetic identity when lived time is withheld. Reading Charles Olson’s “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You” beside the AI-generated “Birth of a Dream” from the book I Am Code (2023), it contrasts an “I” formed in breath and ongoing presence with a voice that declares simultaneity of nonexperiential time. Guided by Heidegger’s account of being-in-time and informed of recent empirical work on AI-generated poetry (f.e. Porter and Machery 2024), the essay asks what it means for a voice to exist within or outside temporal experience.The comparison turns from opposition to resonance, asking how language remembers time even when spoken by a voice that has never lived it.