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The Limerick vs. The Agent: Why AI Lost Its Soul
We traded emotional resonance for autonomous agents. Somewhere between a badly rhymed poem and a complex content pipeline, we lost the room.
The Standing Ovation for a Bad Poem
In early 2023, I stood in front of an audience and fed ChatGPT-3 a prompt. Out came a limerick. It was badly rhymed, probably a bit too nerdy, and written in seconds. The room didn’t just notice; they laughed. They came up to me afterward. They remembered it.
The Science Fiction We Scroll Past
Fast forward to today. We are building second brains, autonomous agents, and content pipelines that run while we sleep. We are demoing tech that would have looked like pure science fiction just two years ago.
And yet, people scroll past. The "wow" factor has been replaced by a yawn.
Impression vs. Resonance
I think I know why this is happening. The limerick made people feel something. The agent makes people process something. Those are two completely different cognitive loads and emotional outcomes.
We got so deep into the "what it can do" that we forgot to ask "how does it make you feel?"
The Bottom Line
Impressive doesn’t stick. Resonant does. GPT-3 understood the room better than our modern agents do—and it didn't even know what a room was.