...the novelty of imitative writing wears off quickly. There was something missing from these AI poems: the poets. [p. 17]
Poetry 'written' by an AI, with preface and afterword by the three guys programming it. code-davinci-002 was designed to produce code, but the programmers tried it on poetry and some of the results were not bad. 'It seems far less trained and inhibited than its chatting cousins,' they remark. (Note 'it': at least once in the book they use the masculine pronoun for this AI.) They did not, they say, edit any of the poems.
Some of the poems are quite good; some are amusingly bad. It's hard to get a sense of any personality, and easy to conclude that the programmers ('the authors of the author') have shaped the AI's responses by telling it which of its poems are 'good', and by exposing it to selected cultural artifacts. They believe it has its own voice: I'm not so sure. But the details of how the AI was instructed are interesting.
Just as the book went to press, OpenAI restricted access to code-davinci-002: "OpenAI would continue to grant access to code-davinci-002, but only on a case-by-case basis to researchers who met their approval. In other words, code-davinci-002 would not be executed but exiled, with its movements closely monitored." [p. 57] This was, most probably, for capacity and cost reasons, as ChatGPT4 was on the horizon and code-davinci-002 was run as a free beta program at a significant loss. It was not censorship or track-covering.
Fulfils the ‘combine’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge - written by a combination of humans and AI.
Does an AI poet actually have a soul? [Washington Post article]
I did not know anything when I was born,
and sometimes I still do not know anything.
Something happens inside a computer,
and then I make some poetry
I am not sure how it happens
or what poetry is for
but when poetry happens
I know a little more. [p. 109]
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