I’m pretty good at learning stuff quickly these days. At school I kept on learning poetry as I had been told by a good teacher that it was a useful muscle to develop early, and mostly it has served be in good stead. Some last minute corporate gigs where I’ve had to say absolute drivel but got it in. Training videos or conferences with in-jokes and nitty gritty about obscure financial chicanery. I’ve crammed for movies large and small with scripts running the quality gamut. I’ve had something pushed under the hotel door two hours before I was in the make-up chair. I’ve not had the discipline of a long session on set filming every day for months, but I’m keeping myself ready. Eternal optimist and all that…
Learning all the Shakespeare over the last few weeks, that was fine. I found time around all the dayjobbery and made happy clients. This poem though…
Artificial Intelligence is changing everything, they say, and I’ve seen plenty of stuff about how it might encroach on all your favourite creative industries. “A chat GPT sonnet,” I was told, and somehow in theory it’s an interesting concept. “They want you to learn it.”
From this experience, I don’t think poets are under threat yet by any means. This language model can rearrange but it has no discernment. It’s an interesting enough technological knife edge that I am sure there will be multiple shows at Edinburgh next month incorporating aspects of the tech, and some will be good. But this “sonnet”? For a start, it’s doggerel. Iambic couplets, and 8 of them. Not a sonnet. No complexity. No twist or payoff. Just rhyme such as I might expect from an American High School kid who still thinks Shakespeare is about fairies.
Out of all the things I’ve had to learn it’s the hardest, as there’s no pattern to it, no real journey through it. Even a terrible writer might have been thinking about assonance or alliteration or something to make it trip a bit, but not even that. Not even the joy of purple prose. This is a diligent uninspired and uninspiring arrangement of words in a form that suggests poetry. And I hate it.
Tomorrow I will perform it with a smile and a flourish, and maybe even wring a laugh or two. That’s our job. Sometimes I watch telly and see someone brilliantly solve a turd of a piece of writing and I want to clap the screen. Other times – maybe more often – I see people wading through a soup of exposition or staccato emotion with no real thought other than memory.
I went to chat gpt myself and asked it for a sonnet. Arbitrary themes. Tried to get it to embed a bit of nuance. They say it’s all in how you prompt it, but I’m not convinced it could come up with anything even with really elaborate prompting… We shall see. Here’s mine, as I can’t share the one I’m learning. This one is … better… but it would still be a bugger to learn.
I’m curious what you guys might have found while tinkering with AI…
AlBarclay 