Robots Are Writing Poetry, and Many People Can’t Tell the Difference

"Robots Are Writing Poetry, and Many People Can’t Tell the Difference." By Carmine Starnino. The Walrus on line. Updated 16:10, May. 13, 2022 | Published 4:35, May. 5, 2022. "This story was originally published as “Poetry & digital personhood” [...] The New Criterion. [...]" As of 25 May 2022, The Walrus article was available here.[1]

Opens with a discussion of Racter, computer program to whom was attributed, The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed: A Bizarre and Fantastic Journey into the Mind of a Machine. The article then moves on to

Racter’s newest descendant. Released in 2020 by OpenAI, a San Francisco startup, GPT-3 is an AI tool that was force-fed a vast portion of the internet. [...] Endowed with algorithms that help it make sense of all that data—“neural” algorithms modelled after the circuitry of the human brain — GPT-3 can produce, from a simple prompt, astoundingly human-like writing of any kind [...]. Of course, there is buzz for GPT-3’s poetic chops too. In one example, American poet Andrew Brown asked the software to take the perspective of a cloud gazing down on two warring cities. GPT-3 delivered a rhyming poem that began, not uncharmingly, with “I think I’ll start to rain.”

On GPT-3, search for the term in the long annotation for The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI.

GPT-3 has now done a work completing S. T. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." "With an estimated billion dollars in backing, GPT-3 isn’t a better Racter; it’s a godlike Racter. Forbes named it the AI “Person” of the Year. Anyone who believed AI to be 'nothing like intelligence,' said one expert," enthusiastically quoted in the article, "'has to have had their faith shaken to see how far it has come.'"

RDE, finishing, 25May22