Can Poetry Survive in Age of AI and Short-form Content?

We live in an age of acceleration. A question that once required a book can now be answered in seconds. A photograph can be generated without a camera. A song can be composed without a musician. And now, a poem can appear on a screen almost instantly, complete with metaphors, rhythm, imagery and emotional language.

Meanwhile, our attention is being reshaped by short-form content as we endlessly scroll through videos. Even literature is expected to compete in the fast-paced space. This raises an uncomfortable question: Can poetry survive in an age that seems determined to make everything faster? Poetry has already survived countless transformations in human civilisation, like wars, censorship, technological revolutions and changing forms of communication. Instead, the true threat is our unwillingness to slow down enough to experience it.

I recently discussed it with Malik Al-Batli, Iraqi poet, writer and journalist, whose reflections offered a perspective that goes beyond the familiar debate over whether artificial intelligence (AI) can write poetry. According to Al-Batli, the humanity of poetry begins with lived experience: “A poet must die many times within poetry for the poem to carry a truly human character.” AI can imitate poetry’s visible structures, but it cannot draw on lived human experience in the same way. Childhood, loss, pain and longing are not merely poetic subjects; they are part of the deeper material from which poetry emerges. 

I believe this distinction raises a broader question: can language alone contain an experience? Poetry goes beyond describing emotions; the true power lies in what it conceals, suggests and leaves unsaid. Poetry demands time and patience: qualities our current culture struggles to provide. Modern short-form content trained us for immediate stimulation, but poetry operates on a different frequency. A reader can move through a poem in seconds and still spend years discovering what a single line meant to them. Some words remain inside us long after we have forgotten where we encountered them.

The danger, therefore, may not be that short-form content is making poetry irrelevant. The greater danger is that we are becoming less comfortable with anything that refuses to give us an immediate answer. Poetry resists that impatience. And perhaps that resistance is precisely why it matters. For Al-Batli, poetry also carries another responsibility: memory. Speaking as an Iraqi poet, he describes memory as “an album of old photographs, a wound that continues to breathe in the present.” 

His perspective highlights how poetry connects history with the emotional realities of those who live through it. “We did not write merely to record events,” he explains. “We wrote to rescue the trace of the human being crushed beneath them.” I believe this distinction reveals something essential about human expression. History tells us what happened, while technology preserves photographs, names, dates and recordings. Archives document destruction, and databases store millions of facts. Yet information alone cannot fully communicate what those facts mean to the people who endure them. 

A photograph may preserve a grieving mother's face, and a record may document when she lost her child. Poetry can explore the silence after the funeral, the emptiness of a room and the persistence of grief. Technology can preserve evidence of suffering, but human expression gives that suffering emotional context. This does not make technology the enemy of poetry. Rather, it challenges us to consider how technology can serve memory without reducing human experience to information. This balance between technological assistance and human expression becomes particularly important as AI increasingly enters the creative process.

AI can be a valuable creative tool for translation, editing, research and experimentation. But, as Al-Batli argues, the important question is “who is directing whom.” I believe this distinction matters increasingly as AI-generated literature grows more sophisticated. Technology serves the poet when it carries their voice; it becomes problematic when it begins determining what they should feel, think or say. The future of poetry may not depend on whether machines can produce beautiful verses. What matters is whether human beings will continue seeking something that beautiful language alone cannot provide. Al-Batli hopes poetry will remain “an incurable ache, forever at odds with time,” even as its forms and tools evolve. I share that hope, believing its survival depends on our willingness to bring lived experience to our words.

Poetry does not need to defeat AI, TikTok, Instagram or short-form content. It needs to preserve what makes it different. In a world designed for rapid consumption, poetry invites us to pause. Where machines reproduce emotional language, poetry reconnects us with the experiences behind it.

Perhaps poetry’s enduring strength lies precisely there. Technology may transform how poems are written, translated and shared, but it cannot determine what a human life means to the person living it. We will still fall in love, lose people, remember places, carry wounds and search for words to express what ordinary language cannot fully explain. As long as these experiences matter, poetry will have a reason to exist. And as long as we remain willing to stop scrolling long enough to feel them, poetry will remain alive.