How AI Made Us More Human

Bruce began with a poem and several AI systems. I began with almost no knowledge of Philip Larkin. What followed was not a lesson delivered by a machine, but a journey into curiosity, memory and the things people still need from one another.

Bruce triggered the whole thing.

He had taken Philip Larkin’s poem This Be the Verse and asked several AI systems to examine it. He was interested not only in their conclusions, but in the routes they took to reach them. The answers were far from uniform. Some were useful. Some wandered into curious territory. Others produced claims that deserved to be questioned.

Together, they created a large body of material around one short and deliberately provocative poem.

Bruce shared the results online.

I knew the name Philip Larkin, but little more. I had moved to Britain shortly before he died, yet he had never really entered my cultural landscape. There were no collections of his poetry on my shelves. I had not studied him at school, and I did not carry the background knowledge that might have allowed me to understand immediately why Bruce had chosen this particular poem.

His exercise assumed a familiarity I did not possess.

That could have been the end of it. I could have glanced at the findings, decided Larkin belonged to somebody else’s education and moved on.

Instead, I became curious.

Entering Larkin Land

I found a BBC documentary and began filling in the missing landscape. I learnt more about the librarian, the poet and the private man. I encountered several of his poems and started to understand why his work had occupied such a prominent place in British cultural life.

The documentary described something it called “Larkin Land”: not merely the poems, but the emotional and physical world around them. Provincial places. Solitude. Desire. Restraint. Disappointment. Ordinary life observed without much protection from sentiment.

Bruce had begun with one narrow piece of this territory. I needed the wider landscape before I could properly understand the questions he had asked.

That difference between us became important.

Bruce was fascinated by what the AI systems made of the poem. I found myself asking whether the poem could be separated from the person who wrote it. Larkin’s family relationships had been difficult. His private life was complicated. Should that influence how we read the poem, or was it a separate question altogether?

Bruce thought it was another road. Potentially an interesting one, but not the road his original exercise had taken.

Almost immediately, our conversation began producing questions that none of the AI systems had been asked.

Had Bruce chosen the right poem for an intergenerational discussion? How much context does a reader need before an AI interpretation becomes useful? Can a machine help us ask better questions? How do we know whether those questions are the right ones?

The original prompt had not settled anything.

It had started something.

Can AI Generate Curiosity?

At one point, I asked whether AI could generate curiosity.

Bruce stopped me.

“Can it help to generate curiosity?” he said.

It was a small correction, but an important one.

The machine had not become curious about Philip Larkin. It had no private desire to understand the poem, no memory of encountering it at school and no sudden urge to watch a documentary about the poet.

But Bruce’s use of AI had helped to generate curiosity in me.

The technology had presented material, comparisons and possible directions. I had responded. I had chosen to look further. When I returned to Bruce, we did not simply repeat what the machines had produced. We questioned the premise, challenged the missing context and began connecting the exercise to larger concerns.

Bruce was interested in exploring the process of AI “thinking,” as he put it in inverted commas. I was more concerned with what happened after the output arrived.

He believed that, in half a day, AI could help him become far more knowledgeable about Larkin than he might otherwise become in the same time. Reading biographies and collections of poetry would take much longer.

I could see the advantage.

I could also see the mountain.

Every answer generated several new questions. Each question could be placed back into an AI system and returned as another analysis, another comparison and another collection of possible directions.

It was possible to learn at extraordinary speed.

It was also possible to drown.

When Curiosity Becomes Indulgent

Bruce recognised the danger himself.

“Curiosity isn’t an end in itself,” he said.

He described the possibility that AI could make his curiosity more indulgent. The machine would always offer another path to follow, another comparison to make and another question to explore. Many AI responses even ended by suggesting what the user might ask next.

There was no natural stopping point.

This brought us back to a question that appears repeatedly in our conversations: what are we going to do with all this material?

I began to say that knowledge was useless unless we did something with it.

Bruce corrected me again.

“Information is useless until you do something with it.”

He was right.

AI can produce information at extraordinary speed and in extraordinary quantities. That does not automatically become knowledge, and it certainly does not become wisdom.

The human being must still decide what matters, what is credible, what connects to experience and what deserves to be carried into another conversation.

This was where our discussion became more valuable than either of us had expected. Bruce had generated a great deal of information before we spoke. I had begun filling in the cultural background that sat outside his original prompt. When we met, the two paths connected.

Bruce brought the experiment.

I brought the questions it had provoked.

Together, we produced what he called “the next generation of questions.”

What the Conversation Added

I asked whether it might not be more fulfilling simply to have the human conversation without involving AI at all.

A conversation can stay with me. I can carry it into the afternoon, turn it over while doing something else and return to it when Bruce and I next meet. A fifty-page analysis may be impressive, but it can also be closed, filed and forgotten.

Bruce’s answer was not that AI should replace the conversation.

It was that we might never have had this particular conversation without it.

That was the point at which the exercise shifted for me.

The machine had not produced the most valuable part. The most valuable part was the connection it created between two people who approached the same material differently.

Bruce tends to move outwards. One question leads towards another field, another comparison and another possible experiment. I tend to pull the discussion back towards use. What does this mean in the life of an ordinary person? What can we do with it? Where does the idea meet the practical world?

Neither approach was sufficient alone.

Bruce’s curiosity opened the field. My resistance forced us to ask what the field was for.

AI had not reduced the need for human conversation. It had made the difference between us more visible and, for a while, more useful.

The Interview That Never Happened

Then the conversation moved somewhere neither of us had planned.

We began talking about the exchange of stories between generations. I asked what was wrong with the simple conversation in which a grandmother tells a grandchild what life was like when she was young.

Bruce agreed that such stories were enormously important. He also observed that they happen less often when generations no longer live close to one another.

Then he spoke about his own father.

Bruce had relatively little contact with his parents during the later part of their lives. His father died decades ago. Looking back, Bruce wished he had been able to interview him about his experience of the twentieth century.

The opportunity had gone.

This was no longer an abstract discussion about what an AI system could say about a poem.

It was about a voice that had not been recorded.

Bruce remembered how difficult such work once was. An interview had to be recorded, transcribed manually, edited and shaped over many hours. Today, a telephone can capture the conversation, while modern tools can help produce a transcript and an initial structure within minutes.

The technology cannot bring Bruce’s father back. It cannot ask the questions Bruce now wishes he had asked.

But it could help another person avoid the same regret.

Bruce suggested that care homes might have somebody—a volunteer or a professional—who sits with residents and helps collect their life stories. The person telling the story receives attention. Families receive a record. A small piece of social history is preserved before it disappears.

Suddenly, the humane possibility of AI became clear.

Its value was not that it could imitate the voice of an elderly person or manufacture a polished memoir without them.

Its value was that it could remove some of the labour surrounding the act of listening.

The machine could transcribe.

The human being still had to sit beside the person and care enough to ask.

The Ordinary Record

This connected directly to what we are trying to do with The Pineapple.

The Pineapple often begins with the ordinary: meals, work, holidays, mistakes, family habits, small discoveries and conversations that might appear insignificant from the outside.

Yet ordinary life becomes history remarkably quickly.

A diary that seems unimportant when it is written may reveal, decades later, how people lived, what they feared and what they believed was normal. A conversation with a parent or grandparent may preserve details that will otherwise vanish with them.

Bruce had found old writing from the 1980s while clearing his home. He could not imagine anybody else wanting to read it, yet he also found it difficult to throw away.

That is the uncomfortable territory of personal records. If we are honest enough, the result may feel unpublishable. If we remove everything uncomfortable, the record may cease to be honest.

AI does not solve that tension.

But it may make it easier to collect the material while the people are still here.

Whatever Happened to Common Sense?

People often speak about AI as though it will inevitably make the world less human.

Our experience moved in the opposite direction.

Bruce’s experiment introduced me to a poet I had largely missed. My curiosity led me into Larkin’s life and work. I returned to Bruce with objections, questions and missing context. Our conversation moved beyond the poem into the purpose of curiosity, the limits of information and the importance of preserving voices between generations.

It ended, as our conversations often do, with another question.

We had been discussing how people decide what should be done simply because technology makes it possible. My wife often says:

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

Bruce asked how we decide.

I offered two words that seemed almost old-fashioned.

“Common sense.”

Then I gave him his next prompt:

“Whatever happened to common sense?”

Bruce paused. He thought the question needed a subtitle.

“I would appreciate your humility in answering that question.”

It was a better response than an answer.

Common sense sounds solid and reassuring, but one person’s common sense may be another person’s prejudice. It is shaped by culture, experience, education and the assumptions we have stopped noticing.

Humility does not make judgement weaker. It reminds us that confidence can outrun understanding.

AI can place unfamiliar material between two people. It can give them something to question, resist and explore. It can lower the practical barriers to recording a life and reveal connections neither person had seen at the beginning.

But it cannot remove the need for judgement. Nor can common sense, however confidently invoked, release us from the need to examine our own assumptions.

Bruce triggered the journey. AI gave it material. I followed the curiosity back to Bruce, and the two of us found ourselves in a more personal conversation than either of us had planned.

The machine did not become more human.

We became more curious, more connected and perhaps a little more humble.