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Dec 16, 2022·edited Dec 16, 2022

There's been a lot of discussion of dangers that AI will take over the world, turn it into paper clips, etc. Less discussed is the prospect it'll produce a lot of crap that superficially resembles intelligent or creative work, thus pushing standards downward in various fields.

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GIGO!

Maybe in several ways, ;-).

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Until it can hold together a metaphor across an entire poem, engage in irony along the way, and play freely with phonetics and rhythm (in the form of alternate spellings, punctuation and whitespacing) to alter interpretations, the poetry from GPT and its ilk will lack substance.

However, I believe the lexical space is a cognitive one, a space for thought; once they have learned to navigate it phonetically, algorithms may well produce true and valuable insights and shed light on relations merely by walking this space in particular constrained ways. The fruit of the tree of language, due to our previous tending, may be particularly easy to juice.without human-level intellect or capacity for understanding.

Here's an example, a gauntlet thrown in challenge to would-be algorithmic poets:

https://thekeyunlocks.substack.com/p/auto-poietic.

How long until machines can pick it up?

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sadly hilarious! Happy New Year, Virginia!

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I love this. Years ago, a colleague set up a Twitter bot--low level version of this. He loved watching people trying to debate with his bot. (But unlike you, they didn't realize that they were arguing with a bot.)

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Given ChatGPT's insistence on sticking in that "best that I/he can be" line, I wonder if this ditty was part of its training: https://open.spotify.com/track/77zatlvIJXcywmVZb69Bcn (Note: "blank" and "poetic abuse")

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For what it's worth, I noticed sometime back that, when asked to write a sonnet, GPT Chat produced a poem that not only wasn't great, but also wasn't a sonnet, wasn't in iambic pentameter, and wasn't even limited to 14 lines.

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Here was my experience with it this weekend: My 14-year-old had a physics midterm. His teacher gave him a sheet of vocab to memorize. I made him flashcards. But gathering those definitions was going to be tedious. No sweat: I scanned the page with my iPhone, copied the text from the image, and then loaded 117 terms into ChatGPT. It instantly kicked back defs for each. Sweet. It can’t write poetry, but it can play IP gofer.

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