Artificial Intelligence: Now Taking The Words Right Out Of Our Mouths I enjoy poetry, both reading and writing it, though I find a fair amount of it insufferable, including a fair amount of my own.
A lot of poetic ideas begin as dreck (as they must, or they won’t begin at all). But — this is the secret — if you somehow strike the balance of stifling your inner editor while still powering through revisions, eventually you might end up with something that truly sparkles and surprises: the musicality of language and the expression of a feeling or experience that no straightforward telling can approximate.
Or sometimes it happens on the first try.
In any case, I was interested to read this week in Vox about public access (talktotransformer.com) to a new version of a synthetic-language system developed by OpenAI, a founder of which was Elon Musk. Artificial intelligence is designed to construct coherent paragraphs by adapting “to the style and content of the conditioning test.”
I was game for an experiment. But I wasn’t about to volunteer writing I like, so I dug up some literally navel-gazing dreck I once thought up in the shower, then entered it into the engine.
Here’s me, kicking things off:
Water from the shower head,
willed from the tap,
spatters off my body as I scrub.
Rivulets scamper
the shower door,
down the simplest
path allowed.
And here’s AI, completing the thought:
We’ve found a good place,
to live without any rules,
no expectations.
I say, “You’ve got to pay with your life.”
You say, “If you’re a free mind, it means you’re not worth anything.”
I’ll never let it go this way,
I know that there must be something that can kill me.
The thought of death
will send me into another wave.
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