--- title: hard.exe (TIAT, San Francisco, 2025) url: https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/hard-exe description: "The machine learns in real time. Audience votes on each poem pair shape the model’s next generation: artisanal RLHF performed live on stage." generated: 2026-10-19 --- # hard.exe ## hard-exe.txt trained performance · trained TIAT, San Francisco December 5, 2025 · 8 poems · 157 votes - [read the poems](#themes) - [chat with the model](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/chat?model=hard) ## hard-exe.jpg ![Audience examining printed poems with blue voting stickers at TIAT San Francisco](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/hard-exe/IMG_0463.JPG) ## about-this-performance.txt Hard.exe is the fourth installment in the Singulars series, an ongoing duel between poet and machine. The poet writes a poem for 30 minutes on a theme proposed by the audience. The model, trained on an anthology of English poetry and past iterations of this performance, responds almost instantly with one of its own. Both poems are printed, hung, and kept anonymous. The audience votes. When the human wins, the machine is retrained on an updated dataset. When the machine wins, the poet adjusts. This is reinforcement learning using human feedback, a popular machine learning technique, made tangible. What emerges is a different narrative for the human and AI encounter. Not a fight but a mutual reinforcement. Not a contest but a feedback ecology where readers become trainers and taste becomes the tuning function. A reinforced model, both human and artificial, trained not to win, but to listen. ![Audience member placing blue voting stickers on printed poems](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/hard-exe/IMG_0464.JPG) ![Two printed poems side by side with blue voting stickers](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/hard-exe/IMG_0465.JPG) The usual question is whether a machine can appear human enough. In this work the pressure runs in the other direction. Sitting behind a panel with a timer running, the poet is the one who has to prove their humanity. If the poem does not resonate, if the dots gather on the other page, it feels less like losing a game and more like failing to be adequately human in public. To win you cannot rely on tricks alone. You have to connect to something true, to tap into experiences that feel specific enough, embodied enough, that an audience of strangers feels it in their own lives. This format is also an intense study of attention. Once attention becomes the prize you can feel how quickly it bends the work into certain shapes. The model rarely goes very far into the conceptual. Where the poet tends to win is in the adjacent zones of shock, surprise, and situational awareness, the small receding edges of context that models are currently unable to inhabit. Paradoxically, this is also what rediscovers what matters in poetry. If you aim only for cheap attention, the poem wins but you lose. The goal becomes cultivating a particular quality of experience in the room, even if that means losing a round. ![Printed poems covered in blue voting stickers](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/hard-exe/IMG_0466.JPG) ![Poems lined up along a wooden ledge with blue stickers accumulating](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/hard-exe/IMG_0476.JPG) The model writes in an instant. The poet takes thirty minutes. At first that feels like a handicap. Over time it becomes clear that the delay changes the poet. It takes thirty minutes to become the poem. The writing rewires you a little each round. There is also a surprisingly tender material side to the work. You learn how to tear and fold paper tape efficiently, how to arrange the wall so that the poems look held rather than slapped on. You get familiar with the printer, how it always struggles with the first page of the day, the faint burnt smell of its effort. Emotionally, the work is intense. At the beginning, when the machine wins, there is a strange pride. It means you have trained a strong model. Later, when the machine starts winning on nights where you have tried your best, it means what you wrote has not connected. That is a very raw feeling. At the same time this rivalry clearly makes for a better poet. The sense of line, structure, and timing sharpens. The tolerance for cliches goes down. You can feel when a poem is sliding into what might be called machine obviousness and pull it back toward something stranger and more human. > It reminded me of a mother whose body changes through the act of feeding a child. The one who nourishes is transformed by the process of nourishment. The experiment does not only rewire the poet and the model. It also changes the corpus itself. Other poets were brought in. Their work was metabolized into the model's training data. This diffused the style, shifted it away from a narrow imitation of one voice, and created a richer, more plural texture. It felt like inviting a small ghostly council of poets into the system. Dataset creation is never one way. The residency made it very clear that the project is not only about better models. It is about using the pressure of a reverse Turing test to discover what kind of humans we still have the chance to become. [read the poems](#themes) ## poems/ 4 themes ### Diegetic 29 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/hard-exe/diegetic) poem a We agree: Moving forward we'll only say "I love you" when we know what we mean the word a sound stretched like a hand cracking the echo chamber of estranger dictionaries open - Here, see this is skin, warm like a promise, hungrier than the future poem b The narrative unfolds in a narrow lane, each stone feels the steps of habitual feet. Rain notices the umbrella symbols, every puddle reflects incomplete déjà-vu. Next door, behind the café window, shadows speak softly in the steam. A baker hums a forgotten chanson, bread rhymes come out caramelized. I choose your back among fluent strays, to say nothing until we've crossed to the other anecdote. We look back, missing the exact moment where speech detaches from what it names. ### Particles 6 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/hard-exe/particles) poem a Particles ligaments of absence I arrive, there, absence 1.12 AM particles dance but do not touch at exactly the same time I desire and I don't exist just this_Hertz vibration of blood particles & particles collision electric spark without charge this car's tuba bellen aerodynamics later somewhere in a fizz of urban particles this ghostly fish egg of your absence poem b The last time you worked with gravity you left a sound and spilled your body all: ↳ over ↳ in all ↳ or nothing → nothing but you and a lump boring through a handful of decades and amnesia and joyful rot and I miss you ### Romance 73 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/hard-exe/romance) poem a This was in Barcelona / Nossara / Carcassonne / in a church / underwater / in broad daylight / on a couch / against a wall / drenched in god's sweat / eyes rolling / white ghost suns / 3d printing skin / red mother / white knuckles / tied free / falling yes / no need to / walk today poem b at dawn the street forgets us gravel sings about footsteps we kept for ourselves your absence a returned light that causes the dust to dance drops the clock's hand I watch the seconds sail through your absence each moment is stamps I collect with no one to exchange them against words which drift towards the horizon ### Sun 49 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/hard-exe/sun) poem a It must have been the 3rd or 4th question after we ordered drinks. He asked why I wore sunglasses on my head even in the middle of winter. This was our 4th or 5th date and the only repeating motif besides the blushing shared silence. I brushed his knuckle, drew the church my grandpa and I kneeled in every summer day, how the sun chameleoned through stained glass, the old man's pressed eyes twenty women chanting god down into country soil with their wails, and so yes my plastic shades a smaller cathedral my hair a softer sacrament. poem b Each ray unfurls wasteful ties on the pavements. A global fabric shivers, survival scoffs delays. Grey clock face marked afternoon. The empty cafe refuses speeches of inked chairs. Light dissolves instead of concrete speeches. A shadow trail animates the sidewalk. I follow it without knowing where it sets out again. Once the light was simple as a syllable. Today a comet crosses my breath. Sun doesn't only fall with sparks but prevaricates my tongue. And when evening imposes its dark the pupils still keep warm light. That is where I find you.