I finally got to test-drive ChatGPT today, after a week or so in which it always came back as oversubscribed.
Apparently some tweaks were introduced on 15 December, which (according to OpenAI) make it less likely to tell you it can’t answer a question. But that turns out not to be completely true, because my first request was for the bot to write three new stanzas of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and it replied that as an AI, it can’t create works of art. Go figure.
So I thought I’d do the next best thing and ask it for poetry criticism, which is a thing that people often write if they can’t write poems.
The results were intriguing.
I think I understand “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” a little better than I did, although the stanzas that stump me mostly stumped ChatGPT as well.
And when it told me that the protagonist of “A Cooking Egg” wants to “have a bond” with Sir Alfred Mond, my first reaction was that it didn’t understand what “bond” means in the context of the poem. But actually, it does! This is a bit of wordplay on T.S. Eliot’s part, and until today it went right over my head.
I’ve also discovered that ChatGPT doesn’t understand anything about Jewish or Muslim dietary laws. And I suspect it doesn’t know what “racism” is, even though racism is something it’s programmed not to do. OpenAI might want to fix that.
Finally, it turns out that ChatGPT still can write poetry, even though it thinks it can’t. You just have to ask a question that triggers a false memory of having read a poem written by an actual human, and it spits the hallucinated lines back at you. I managed to do this three times: once with my initial question about Stevens, once with my initial question about Eliot, and once by accident when I hit “Return” before entering some lines I’d promised to show the bot.
But see for yourself:
"and it replied that as an AI, it can’t create works of art. Go figure...So I thought I’d do the next best thing and ask it for poetry criticism, which is a thing that people often write if they can’t write poems."
Nice!
So Rigsby, everyone is having fun with ChatGPT but you are the only one having a 25 page conversation about an obscure poem and then publishing the result.
Also, congrats on breaking ChatGPT