I instructed ChatGPT to act like a poetry-writing bot who creates rhymed verse in a science fiction and fantasy influenced style, and then I gave it this prompt:
This was its first attempt at a reply, written in under two seconds:
I still like to think my stuff is better than this, but oh boy is the A.I. stuff getting better. Anyway, I wasn’t feeling well this week, so I’m taking my week off for Q1 2024. I’ll spend this time recuperating, and thinking about how cool it would have been to be a writer in the 50s when magazines mattered and the entire media industry wasn’t on the verge of total replacement by machines.
Also this stanza:
Okay that slaps right there. My main complaint about this poem at this point is that some of the meter and syllabic construction is uneven and sloppy, but that quatrain is syllable-perfect and a very interesting poetic combination of specific and mysterious. In the words of Pope John Paul II: The future starts today, not tomorrow.
Hope everybody has a great week, and I’ll be back next week with another original (HUMAN-POWERED!) story!
I've been trying my best to ignore the whole A.I. thing and hope it somehow goes away (which I know is foolish), but poems like that scare me.
We use ChatGPT for stuff like “how to create a mailing list for your podcast” and it’s a great tool. But as a replacement of creativity…I hope not.