I’ve been reading Maria Popova for years, with the kind of admiration that turns underlines into quiet rituals. Her essays have moved me, surprised me, and stayed with me—the kind of writing you return to like a well-worn book or a half-remembered dream. At Jot Down, we’ve had the privilege of translating and publishing several of her pieces with her blessing, always trusting that her way of looking at the world helps expand it. A few days ago, she published a reflection titled “Uncoding Creativity in the Age of AI: What Makes a Great Poem, What Makes a Great Storyteller, and What Makes Us Human” in which she argues that no machine could ever write a truly great poem.
Maria Popova is a singular presence in Anglophone cultural life. Born in Bulgaria and now based in the U.S., she has turned her website The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) into a kind of digital sanctuary, where philosophy, literature, and science converge—everything filtered through an unwavering devotion to beauty, as she understands it. Her prose, both elegant and approachable, conveys a contemplative sensitivity that has drawn millions of readers searching for meaning, depth, and aesthetic refuge. But that sensibility, like all lofty moralities, has its blind spots. At times, it risks slipping into a kind of emotional catechism, where melancholy masquerades as depth and reverence as truth.
Her recent claim—that AI will never write a poem worthy of Walt Whitman—belongs to this genre of philosophical comfort food. Popova recounts asking ChatGPT for a Whitman-esque poem about a solar eclipse. The result didn’t move her: a string of predictable rhyming couplets, lacking awe, devoid of resonance. Her conclusion is stark: AI possesses language, but not experience. Whitman, by contrast, could carve out emotional galaxies with ordinary words. Because the machine cannot suffer, it cannot make art. A poem, she declares, is made not of words, but of pain. And pain, like consciousness, is uniquely human.
It’s a seductive idea, but also a deeply naive one.
The fact that AI does not suffer doesn’t mean it can’t produce art. This mystical link between pain and beauty is a romantic inheritance—charming, but flimsy under scrutiny. Homer didn’t need to lose a child to write Achilles’ wrath. Shakespeare didn’t have to die of jealousy to give us Othello. Emily Dickinson barely left her house, yet wrote eternity. Art is not a direct transcription of trauma, but its transformation. Its form. Often, it’s a lie more beautiful than any lived truth.
Este artículo de nuestro archivo está completo para lectores registrados. Registrarse es gratis y solo lleva un minuto.
