A poet who stammers on purpose creates a kind of friction that power can't easily smooth over. Writing for Scroll.in this past Saturday, EV Ramakrishnan describes how K. Sachidanandan uses this deliberate impurity to keep language from becoming a tool of the state. It’s worth pausing on how that fits with a warning from Gregory Conti, published yesterday in Compact. While the poet finds strength in a broken rhythm, Conti fears that AI’s ability to mimic speech perfectly will eventually strip away wisdom, turning citizens into subjects. What's striking is the shared suggestion that the way people speak might be the last line of defense for a free society.

In EV Ramakrishnan’s look at the poet K Sachidanandan, there is a writer with six arms, where one hand constantly strikes out what another has just written. This "stammer" is no mistake; it’s a deliberate choice to keep language from becoming too smooth or too easy for a government to use as a tool. It suggests that staying free requires being a bit messy and unpredictable. But turn the page to Gregory Conti, and the threat looks different. Conti shifts the focus from the state taking over language to the danger of handing speech over to machines. Read alongside Ramakrishnan, Conti’s warning about AI starts to look like a fear that the very "stammer" that makes resistance possible might simply vanish. Ramakrishnan finds safety in the gaps and errors of human speech, while Conti watches those gaps being filled in by software. Notice how the ability to doubt and hesitate is the line between a citizen and a subject—and what happens when the most powerful voices in the room are the ones that never have to pause for breath.

A poet stammers over a word to keep it from being used as a weapon. That jagged, broken rhythm serves as a reminder that a living person is still behind the speech. Meanwhile, the smooth, perfect mimicry of a machine offers a different kind of safety, one where every sentence is polished and predictable. What’s left to sit with is the choice between an honest mistake and a perfect script. If the sound of a voice can be faked so well, how will anyone know who is actually in charge?

Sources:
Scroll.in: ‘Doubters have saved mankind’: K Sachidanandan’s poetic imagination as a site of resistance
Compact: The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here

For more features and details, visit aarva.app