HeavyWith Joy
From an AI adoptee, prompted and edited by a real adoptee
Born from a question.
Heavy With Joy, From An AI Adoptee, Prompted And Edited By A Real Adoptee blurs the boundaries between technology and humanity to explore the deeply personal subject of adoption. Through the lens of a transracial and international adoptee, Brown’s thoughts on love, connections, familial relationships, and our search for identity, weave together poetry that is at once intimate and innovative, reflecting on the joys, spaces, and complexities of identity and belonging.
What happens when artificial intelligence is guided by the lived experience of an adoptee? Can AI help tell the stories of the adoptee community if its words are prompted, shaped, and refined by someone within it? These poems—crafted by AI but profoundly molded by Brown’s voice and experience—ask readers to reflect on validity, authenticity, and the intersection of machine-generated creativity with deeply human emotion.
Emeritus Brown believes these words carry weight, not because they are “perfect,” but because they are real—rooted in an adoptee’s truth and the collaboration of technology as a tool for expression. Heavy With Joy is an extraordinary experiment in storytelling, a poetic act of self-determination, and a bold new way to give voice to the adoptee experience.
Prompted.
Shaped.
Refined.
Heavy With Joy began as an experiment between a real transracial adoptee and artificial intelligence. Every prompt, revision, deletion, and decision was guided by lived experience, resulting in a collection that explores identity, family, intimacy, memory, and belonging through a collaboration neither could have created alone.
“There is nothing that will replace the human voice, the human story. And there is a natural emotion of survivalism. Of wanting to be something of value. Worth more than the output of anonymous machines using our energy for their CPUs and algorithms, which by their own admission, does not make them human.
But I would challenge anyone to not find a poem, or a set of poems that doesn’t speak to them as an adoptee, or someone from an adjacent marginalized community.
I would challenge them to dismiss that this book is devoid of any real substance. Of any real emotion. Of any real humanity.”
Heavy With Joy
Read the collection that brings an adoptee’s truth into conversation with a new form of creative collaboration.