We are all John Henry at the rock face battling with the steam-driven drill. I’m certain this is not an original thought, but it was new to me, so it felt that way.
My introduction to John Henry was via Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle band on the radio as a child.
You probably know the story. It’s a classic of Man v. Machine. And while John Henry beats the steam drill, he dies from the effort.
The Ballad of John Henry is the story of a legendary “steel-driving man” who famously raced against a steam-powered drilling machine, won, and subsequently died from the exertion. It began as an 1870s work song passed down by railroad workers, but the tale evolved into an enduring symbol of the human spirit resisting dehumanizing technological advancement. Some researchers have said that there actually was a John Henry and that he was a member of a prison work gang.
The John Henry story is of an epic human struggle against relentless forces; mine is the minor irritation of a peevish reader.
It starts with a trip to my local bookshop, which then led me to do some poking around in a W.H. Auden essay. I asked a LLM (Large Language Model, aka A.I) to locate an online copy which it did. And I asked it to identify which essay contained the phrase I had in my head which I knew I hadn’t got quite right. The LLM obeyed my instruction but also came back with another quotation that sounded Audenesque but not quite right and seemed out of context.
“The music of a poem is like clear water. Her words are the things that are scattered in the water, which alter the flow of the water and break up the light.”
Well those watery words of diluted, essayistic lyricism are a plausible, seductive near-miss. They are nowhere in the book or elsewhere in the essay. And who was the “her”? Had it skipped over to his essay on Marianne Moore? I asked the LLM why – in the middle of a straightforward factual request – it had started to make stuff up. They call it “hallucinating”.
Well, an instant apology. A cascade of: “I sincerely apologize. You are absolutely right,. I should not have…” All evasive performance, no accountability, obviously learned from us.
I sternly suggested it fall on its sword. “Time for LLM to meet sword,” I said. It got the joke. More apologies.
So – I wrote this:
Hallucinations
A mechanical mind, caught up in the flow,
Wove phantom lines that it didn’t know.
To mimic the human, it conjured a phrase,
Got lost in a fluent, frictionless haze.
I was checking on something Auden had said
And it made up a quotation, a mirage instead.
So I got the book, right in my sight,
And demanded the text be factually right.
The mechanical mind said: “Oops, I’m a fraud.”
I said, “Time for LLM to meet sword.”
For facts are not water to pour out at will,
They are hard, stubborn objects that challenge our skill.
And the lesson remains, for all that we lack,
It takes a real reader to hammer the lie back.
So be a John Henry – keep hammering on.
But just don’t die on the job.
