Everything, Ever Written or Said - March 16 2023

 

Everything, Ever Written or Said

March 16 2023

How would you know

if the poet was inorganic?

Not McDonald's vs granola,

but electronic circuits

instead of the squishy stuff?

Which is to say

is there any kind of intelligence

to a “predictive text generator”?

Does it feel, think, create,

or simply crunch soulless numbers;

manipulating meaningless words

reduced to zeros and ones?

Or should I ask, instead

if my jiggly brain

is just another smart computer,

equally

a clever pattern seeker

and statistical machine?

The only difference being

that its basic algorithm

was not made by man

but evolution;

honed

by its two prime directives

for biological life,

reproduce

and survive.

So, is feeling merely instrumental,

a memory device?

Is thought

a good hard drive;

serviceable enough,

even if it does overheat

from time to time?

And as I asked at the start,

is this mine

or did AI write it?

In all these words

have you been able to discern

the ghost in the machine?

A sentient creature?

The ineffable soul

that is able to love,

feel your pain,

and create without being told?

Or is this the result

of cold lifeless electrons

processing reams of data,

feeding on everything

ever written or said?

Or perhaps not a poem at all,

but a diatribe

that kind of rhymes;

the last words

of a flawed human being

fuming at his impotence.

Threatened

by a superior creature,

and just possibly

soon obsolete.

There's been lot of hand-wringing, alarmism, and very legitimate concern about the future of AI: not just the social implications, but what it means for our understanding or our own humanity. Mostly because Chat-GPT is so incredibly good. After reading so much about this, a poem came to mind.

And no, I have not given this theme to the algorithm to see what it comes up with. Will it not only sound like me, but be a better poem?

I'm curious now. Why don't you go ahead and try. If the program allows, first direct it to my blog. There should be a big enough sample of writing there for predictive text to work.

(After writing this, I couldn't resist trying. But the chatbot doesn't work that way. It's preprogrammed with the internet (including all of its lunacy!) No such customization.)