Right after Thanksgiving, I published a super fun electric-utility themed version of a classic 19th century holiday poem. Creating it was so energizing! Pun intended. I’m no poet, so you may be wondering how I brought it to life – so here’s the backstory:
It all started in November, sometime before Thanksgiving. My wife came home from work with news that she and her colleagues needed to record a holiday message for their entire business unit—which just so happens to be my entire business unit as well. Naturally, I encouraged her to “have fun with it!” But as I encouraged her, I couldn’t shake the feeling of missing out. Why should she have all the fun? I, too, wanted to create a holiday message to my team and to “have fun with it”!
My first thought was to create a recorded message, just like hers, complete with me wearing an ugly Christmas sweater with a carefully staged nearly-empty glass of milk and an artful yet obvious sprinkling of cookie crumbs. While amusing, I quickly realized this might veer slightly too far into the unprofessional lane. I needed something equally fun but more fitting for the occasion. Then it hit me—what about an electric-utility-themed holiday poem? And not just any poem—what if I reimagined “A Visit from St. Nicholas” with a utility twist?
On ChatGPT We Depend??
Over the past year, I’ve been training myself to instinctively reach for ChatGPT when I need an initial impression of an idea—much like the reflexive way I have turned to Google for questions I can’t immediately answer. Naturally, I leaned on ChatGPT for validating this holiday poem concept. I asked if it thought the idea had potential, and if so, could it generate a version of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” with an electric utility theme? Sure enough, out popped a couple dozen rhyming couplets. I quickly skimmed through them, and they had me chuckling – my belly shaking like a bowl full of jelly. That confirmed it—there was something here! I immediately shared the poem with my wife, and she got a kick out of it, too.
But then, I kept reading…
The more I read ChatGPT’s version, the more the novelty wore off and the more I began to notice its shortcomings compared to its human-generated analog: it lacked flow, a cohesive narrative, and the satisfying length and structure of the original poem. Some of the technical jargon, while it rhymed, didn’t actually make sense in the context of the utility theme—it felt forced. What I had was amusing but not substantive enough to carry the weight of an end-of-year holiday message for my team. It wasn’t bad for a casual laugh, but I wanted something with more depth and meaning—something that could truly resonate. So, what did I do?
Disillusionment to Enlightenment
Ultimately, I decided to take the best parts of ChatGPT’s output, discard the rest, and insert my own language to craft the poem I envisioned. To refine it further, I had ChatGPT generate dozens of versions, extracting the signal from the noise. I pulled out the couplets that elicited the biggest laughs from my wife and I, rearranged them into a logical and linear narrative, and edited the jargon to make it accurate and relatable. For the gaps that remained, I added my own language—and occasionally leaned on ChatGPT for inspiration for a particular rhyme when the right word escaped me. I would feed in the relevant couplets into ChatGPT replacing the unknown word with a <PLACEHOLDER> and ask for suggestions. After about ten hours of meticulous tweaking over several days, the poem you read in my previous post was born.
I was thrilled! I couldn’t contain my excitement over what I had compiled, and I had to share it. So, Step 1: I published it on the blog. Step 2: Send it to my team… but… I couldn’t wait until my last day in the office for that satisfying moment of social validation. Forget delayed gratification—I wanted accolades now! So, I texted the only person I knew who would fully appreciate the sheer nerdiness of it all.
“A delight!”, he texted back. I had my ‘attaboy’ and was satisfied 😄
I shared it with a few more colleagues to gather feedback. One suggested that instead of embedding the poem directly into an email, I should create a PDF with graphics. That sparked an idea, and I decided to go all in. I asked ChatGPT to generate visuals—”a mashup of symbology of electric transmission equipment and the garland you would use to decorate your home for the holidays to use in the upper and lower margins of a document“. The results? Amazing. I loved the festive-yet-technical vibe it gave to the piece in spite of its obvious AI-generated aesthetic. You can see here what I got from it.
With the visuals complete, I drafted my holiday message, attached the PDF, and carefully stashed it in my Drafts folder. It waited there, ready to dazzle, until my last day in the office before the holidays.
The Human Element
But that’s not the end of the story. The colleague I had first shared the poem with texted me on the first Sunday of December. He asked if I would be attending the Officer-Director holiday dinner for Electric Transmission. When I said I would, he replied, “Would you be able to read that poem at dinner?”
I burst out laughing. “This is hilarious!”, I thought.
Of course, I agreed. The next evening, I had the privilege of reading the poem in front of dozens of my senior colleagues. Their response—laughter, smiles, and genuine warmth. One colleague from the communications team suggested printing it and displaying it on easels around the company. After I got to share the EOY holiday message with my own team, we made it happen.
Substance
So, what’s the moral of this story? Is it a lesson in the evolving definition of authorship? Or perhaps a reflection on the nuances between authorship and editorship? A festive display of ego? No, it’s none of these things. The real lesson lies in the visceral connection between art and humanity—a connection I learned viscerally, perhaps for the first time, through this exercise.
ChatGPT gave me the spark that launched a creative process, but it was my investment that transformed it into something meaningful. I gave the poem what AI couldn’t (at least not yet!): a theme, pathos, narrative, subtext, symbolism, allegory, satirical wit uniquely tailored to my community, and more. And, I got to share this not simply over an email exchange with my employees, but in meat-space itself – something I think we forget that we all inhabit.
Getting to share something so culturally appropriate with my colleagues in-person was an experience that artificial intelligence (or even social media), itself, can never give me. Human connection is palpable and carries true weight.
It has substance – literally!
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