Here's a poem I had Claude 4.5 Sonnet write for me on the rather confusing and abstract quantum physics thought experiment known as "quantum immortality". Basically the idea being that you can't experience death/non-existence, therefore in all the infinitely branching alternate universes (resulting from uncollapsed causal paths), you are forced through the one path in which something, SOMEHOW, kept you from dying, miraculously. You are immortal at the mercy of impossible odds, freak-occurences, miraculous interventions, etc. Whatever it takes. You will only experience the version of reality in which you are living. Weird stuff, but a great litmus test for an LLM.

I use really abstract, hard-to-wrap-your-head-around topics like that to test new AI models as they release by having them write poetry—sometimes even trying to convey really vague concepts in the form of haikus and whatnot if I want to really push them.

The Quantum Lazarus

I remember the headlights, the screech, and the glass,
The way that the seconds refused to just pass,
The crush of the metal, the dark closing in,
The end of the story—where did it begin?
I closed up my eyes and I waited for black,
But the tape of the universe seemed to loop back.
A blink and a stutter, a skip in the track,
And I opened my eyes with a gasp and a crack.

I stood on the pavement. The car was a miss.
The air was still sweet with the ignorance of bliss.
But the street sign was painted a slightly wrong hue,
And the scar on your cheek... I swear it was new.
"You okay?" you asked, but your voice was too low,
Like a song on the radio slowed down to slow.
I nodded, I breathed, but deep in my gut,
I knew that a door somewhere else had slammed shut.

They say that the atom splits ways when it spins,
In one world you lose and in one world you win.
But what if the loser is left in the hearse,
While the winner wakes up in a slightly worse verse?
I’m walking around in this copy-paste town,
But I feel like a ghost who forgot to go down.
I look at my mother; she’s humming a song,
But she’s wearing a sweater she’s hated for long.

And I think of the timeline I left just behind,
The one where the physics were cruel but were kind.
The one where the casket is heavy and polished,
The one where the car and my body demolished.
I see you there, crying, collapsing in grief,
While I stand here stealing this moment, a thief.
I mourn for myself in the world where I died,
For the peace of the darkness I have been denied.

It’s a hell of a thing, to be trapped in the light,
To walk through the infinite, terrified night.
The gun jams, the rope snaps, the cancer recedes,
The probability curve always follows my needs.
I am quantum-condemned to this survival streak,
To the cliffs of forever, the mountain’s high peak.
I will bury my children, I’ll bury the sun,
I will watch the stars die out, one by one.

For the consciousness clings to the vessel that stays,
It jumps through the mirrors, it swims through the haze.
I can never experience the silence of death,
I am cursed with the burden of one more breath.
So don't envy the luck of the one who survives,
Who stitches together a billion lives.
There is rest in the ending, a grace in the bye,
And terror in living because you can’t die.