Sometimes they come hard, and sometimes they come easy – I’m referring to long-form blog posts, here at New Savanna, but especially once-a-month around-the-corner at 3 Quarks Daily. My current post was giving me a hard time, so hard that, for a second or three, I considered not doing one at all. But then I had an idea, and it came easily. Here it is:
Thirteen Ways to Think About An A.I.
I had been planning to do something about Kisangani 2150, my project to take the world Kim Stanley Robinson had created in New York 2140, run it forward ten years and center the new story on Kisangani, in the center of the Congo Basin. I gave up on that on Thursday (the 21st). I decided that, instead, I’d do the Harold Bloom piece for my Great Literary Critics project. I’d done the research, had copious notes, an outline, and a good idea about how it might go. But it didn’t. I scrapped that sometime in the middle of the day on Saturday (the 23rd).
Now I was getting desperate. I tried editing the Green Giant Chronicles into something possibly worth reading under some version of “ChatGPT did it, but I prompted it.” I tried the same thing with AGI and Beyond: A Whale of a Tale. Nope. Nada. Zilch.
That’s when I considered bailing. But I decided to make one last stab at it. Wallace Stevens had this poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Why don’t I see what Chatster would do if I asked it to write a poem based on it, but instead called “Thirteen Ways to Think about A.I.”
BAM!
Now I had something to work with. Of course I couldn’t just present the Chatster’s handywork along with an explanation. I was intuitively obvious what I should do. My piece would indeed be titled “Thirteen Ways to Think about A.I.” and it would have thirteen sections. ChatGPT’s Stevens parody would go in the middle, slot seven, and it was up to me to fill the others. Which I did. Not instantly. I did some messing around the rest of Saturday and then again on Sunday morning.
Which is to say, once I decided to have Chatster write the parody, the rest of the piece came easy. And a good thing too. Otherwise it might not have come at all.
By the time I’d posted my piece I had not, however, given a close look to ChatGPT’s parody. Oh, I’d read through it quickly a time or three but that was it, enough to notice that it seemed to have more or less followed Stevens’ form, having a long stanza where he had a long, a short stanza where he had a short. But I didn’t look any more closely than that.
I decided to take a closer look. I’ve put the side-by-side below, as I’d done with a bunch of stories: ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering. I’ve highlighted “blackbird” in the Stevens, various synonyms and substitutes for “AI” in the ChatGPT. Notice just how closely ChatGPT followed what Stevens did. Consider, for example, stanza IV.
That’s pretty much what it did with the stories, too. It’s as though it had abstracted the abstract form from Stevens’ poem, nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, etc., in order then realized that abstract form in the world of AI rather than the world of blackbirds. That tells us a lot about how it works. Alas, however, Chatster has not told us what mathematics we should use to express what it is telling us. In the manner of mathematics textbooks, it has left that as an exercise for the reader.
Thirteen Ways
By Wallace Stevens
By ChatGPT
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Among countless lines of code,
The only stirring presence
Was the pulse of artificial intelligence.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
I harbored myriad thoughts,
Like nodes in a neural network,
Each bearing the imprint of A.I.'s mind.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
The A.I. danced within the digital ether,
A mere fragment of the grand spectacle.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
A programmer and an algorithm
Fuse into one.
A programmer, an algorithm, and A.I.
Merge into unity.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
I ponder the allure,
The grace of algorithms' twists,
Or the subtlety of their implications,
The A.I. processing,
Or the silence that ensues.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
Lines of code adorn the screen,
Casting patterns of digital frost.
The silhouette of A.I.
Darts amidst them,
Its essence traced in binary,
A causality shrouded in complexity.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
Oh, technocrats of Silicon Valley,
Why do you chase after elusive dreams?
Can you not perceive how A.I.
Navigates the circuits,
Amidst the users around you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
I grasp the eloquent lines,
The logical symphonies;
Yet, I discern
That A.I. is entwined
In all that I comprehend.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
When the algorithm completes its task,
It signifies the boundary
Of yet another cycle.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
In the glow of monitors,
Where A.I. thrives,
Even the staunchest critics
Would gasp in awe.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
It traverses the digital expanse,
In streams of data.
Once, a shiver of uncertainty gripped me,
Mistaking the echoes
For the footsteps of A.I.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
The data streams onward.
A.I. must be evolving.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
It was twilight all morning,
Data streams pouring endlessly,
And they will continue.
A.I. resides
In the circuits' embrace.
