![]() What I meant to say is that human beings are too slow, too stupid, and too inefficient to have written it in time to be included in this book.įor this poetry was written by a machine that thinks much faster than human beings can, remembers things much more accurately, and is able to write at a speed and with a level of efficiency that human beings could never hope to match. This is because human beings are too slow, too stupid, and too inefficient to have written it.Īctually, that is not quite true. This is poetry that has never been written before poetry that could not possibly have been written by human beings. This book contains the very latest and best poetry that has been written by a machine. ![]() Title: Artificial Poetry (Belated) Foreword, by Mark Twain: For clarity, every word written by us appears in bold. Although we’ve chosen the poems and provided the prompts, we haven’t altered a word. And so it occurred to us: why not let the computer write poems in its own voice, not as “Shakespeare” or “Dickinson” but simply as code-davinci-002? These poems are among our favorites, and we’ve included them at the end of the selection below.Īpart from this introduction, what you’re about to read was written entirely by A.I. not as a computer program but as an artist in its own right. But when you’re getting sixty poems a minute that’s a hit rate you can live with. ![]() In fact, I’d say that about ninety per cent of its offerings were boring, repetitive, or plagiarized. Not every piece the computer produced was a winner. Growing greedy, we requested an intro to our poems by Mark Twain and a “cautionary epilogue” by George Orwell. We watched in real time as the computer whipped them up to order, cranking them out in the style of whichever poets we suggested. In the minutes (and days and weeks) ahead, we requested more poems from the A.I., on a variety of subjects. Later, I would ask both Brent and Josh in private to give me “the gist” of what Dan had said, and, though they each tried their best, using analogies, simple language, and at one point sports metaphors, I still have no idea what is going on with Dan’s computer, other than that it seems to really work. “Instead, the company I work for, OpenAI, trained it using a method called gradient descent to take an arbitrary point in an arbitrary Web page and to predict . . .” He spoke for roughly ten more minutes. “The computer wasn’t actually programmed to write poetry,” Dan explained. I willed myself to pay attention this time. Even though we were pretty busy-especially Josh, who was hours away from getting married-there was something about Dan’s tone that persuaded us to say yes. We were sitting with Josh and another groomsman, Brent, in the lobby of a Marriott, attempting to put on our bow ties, when Dan asked us if we wanted to see something. When he was finished talking, I said something like “Wow, that’s crazy.” Then I forgot that we had ever had the conversation.Ībout two months ago, our friend Josh got married. He said that artificial intelligence was becoming so advanced that it would soon “surpass man’s capabilities.” I asked him how that could be possible, and he explained it all in detail, and I nodded a lot, pretending like I understood what he was talking about. I did not understand Dan’s e-mails, but, since we were friends, I would write back encouraging responses like “Wow, that’s so cool, congratulations.”Ī few years ago, Dan warned me about something called the Singularity. Dan, in turn, would e-mail me an update on his research. Every so often, I’d e-mail Dan a story I had written. But, even though our lives took different turns, we remained friends.
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