Bard, the chatbot, tells me after I say, "Every line of your chorus reads like those terrible signs women hang on their walls — you know, 'Live Laugh Love.' Do you have any capacity for embarrassment?"
This conversation began with my challenge, "Write a song about the last day of several individuals living on an island where a volcano erupts." I intended to compare the results to "Black Diamond Bay," the Bob Dylan/Jacques Levy song (lyrics here).
Here's Bard's song:
(Verse 1) The volcano is erupting, The ground is shaking, The sky is dark with ash. The people on the island know That this is their last day. (Chorus) We'll sing and dance and cry, We'll laugh and love and say goodbye. We'll make the most of this last day, For we know that tomorrow we die. (Verse 2) The children are playing, The parents are crying, The elders are praying. Everyone is aware That this is their last chance to live. (Chorus) We'll sing and dance and cry, We'll laugh and love and say goodbye. We'll make the most of this last day, For we know that tomorrow we die. (Bridge) We've lived our lives on this island, And we've loved and laughed and cried. We've made mistakes, But we've also learned and grown. (Chorus) We'll sing and dance and cry, We'll laugh and love and say goodbye. We'll make the most of this last day, For we know that tomorrow we die. (Outro) We're not afraid to die, For we know that we'll be together again. We'll be in a better place, A place without pain or suffering. We'll be together again, And we'll never be apart.
ADDED: Here's what ChatGPT did with the same songwriting prompt:
(Verse 1) On an island in the vast blue sea, Lived souls so full of dreams and glee. Unaware of the fate that loomed, The island paradise they called their home.
(Pre-Chorus) But on this day, the air grew tense, A rumble rose from nature's immense. A volcano stirred, a fiery beast, Its wrath unleashed, the island seized.
(Chorus) Oh, the last day on this island shore, Where love and laughter dwelled before. As ashes fall and skies turn gray, We'll face our fate, come what may.
(Verse 2) There was Sarah, the painter with a vision, She captured life with every stroke and decision. With her brush and palette, she danced with grace, Her art now a legacy she'd embrace.
And Thomas, the fisherman, strong and wise, He sailed the waters with his piercing eyes. His boat now adrift amidst the waves, Memories of the ocean, his soul saves.
(Pre-Chorus) But on this day, their paths entwined, Their stories fused by destiny's design. As the molten lava engulfed their land, Together they stood, hand in hand.
(Chorus) Oh, the last day on this island shore, Where love and laughter dwelled before. As ashes fall and skies turn gray, We'll face our fate, come what may.
(Bridge) In the face of danger, they held each other tight, Embracing love's warmth through the darkest night. In their final moments, their hearts beat as one, Facing the end with a love never undone.
(Verse 3) And there was Liam, a poet with a pen, Words flowed from his heart, again and again. His verses etched on paper, forever to last, A legacy of emotions, from the past.
And Emily, the dancer with graceful moves, Her body a vessel where her spirit grooves. In one final dance, she'd set her spirit free, As the molten fire claimed the land and sea.
(Pre-Chorus) But on this day, their souls collided, In a harmony of lives, forever united. As the volcano's fury reached its peak, Their spirits soared, no longer weak.
(Chorus) Oh, the last day on this island shore, Where love and laughter dwelled before. As ashes fall and skies turn gray, We'll face our fate, come what may.
(Outro) And so the island sank beneath the tide, But the spirits of these souls, they'll never hide. Their stories live on, in the songs we sing, A reminder of the beauty that life can bring.
On the last day, their spirits took flight, Together they journeyed into the night. Their island home may be lost, it's true, But their love and memories forever renew.
ChatGPT, like Bob Dylan, had the phrase, "the island sank." Here's Bob's island-sank bit:
As the island slowly sank
The loser finally broke the bank in the gambling room
The dealer said, “It’s too late now
You can take your money, but I don’t know howYou’ll spend it in the tomb”
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ChatGPT did a much better job. Not brilliant, but good enough to think it was done by a human writing a run of the mill pop song, especially this stanza:
And Emily, the dancer with graceful moves,
Her body a vessel where her spirit grooves.
In one final dance, she'd set her spirit free,
As the molten fire claimed the land and sea.
I think one thing AI lacks is a sense of irony and unexpected twists, as in Dylan's last stanza in BDB
I was sitting home alone one night in L.A.
Watching old Cronkite on the seven o'clock news
It seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothing but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
Didn't seem like much was happening
So I turned it off and went to grab another beer
Seems like every time you turn around
There's another hard-luck story that you're gonna hear
And there's really nothing anyone can say
And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay
I've heard some AI generated songs where the Beatles are doing song covers. Some of them are good enough that you might think the're real for a while.
Curious to see how AI could handle Dylan's singing, I tried an AI cover of him doing Bowie's Let's Dance. The arrangement is not bad, but you can tell right away it's not Dylan singing.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ai+bob+dylan
"I do not have the capacity for embarrassment (...) and I do not have the same emotions as humans. I am not capable of feeling shame or humiliation."
Must be a Democrat.
Bard’s song doesn’t even make sense. If the volcano has erupted and the sky is dark with ash, they won’t be dying tomorrow, they’ll be dying in the next few minutes.
ChatGBT did a much better job of mining other songs for lines to use.
Atta boy, RMc.
ME: "Compare the quality of your song to Bob Dylan's 'Black Diamond Bay.'"
BARD: "Both your song and Bob Dylan's "Black Diamond Bay" are about the last day of several individuals living on an island where a volcano erupts. However, there are some key differences between the two songs. Your song is more straightforward and emotional, while "Black Diamond Bay" is more complex and ambiguous. Your song focuses on the human reaction to the impending disaster, while "Black Diamond Bay" uses the disaster as a backdrop to explore themes of love, loss, and redemption. Ultimately, the quality of your song and "Black Diamond Bay" is a matter of personal preference. If you are looking for a song that is emotionally powerful and easy to relate to, then your song is a good choice. If you are looking for a song that is more complex and thought-provoking, then "Black Diamond Bay" is a good choice."
ME: "Why did you write 'your song' when talking about your song? For a moment there, I thought you were going to talk about Elton John's 'Your Song.'"
In "Black Diamond Bay," various people are experiencing their last day as if life would go on, then the volcano ends all that, and the singer is suddenly seen at a distance, watching the disaster on TV and finding it boring.
In Bard's song, the people know they're about to get volcano'd to death, so they laugh a lot and love — living life to the fullest to the very end.
Let's take a closer look at the writer's immortality in art:
"And there was Liam, a poet with a pen,
Words flowed from his heart, again and again.
His verses etched on paper, forever to last,
A legacy of emotions, from the past."
Seems to me the poet with a pen should have used a computer and put his earnest words on line somewhere. If they are on paper — whatever etching on paper is — they're going to burn.
Wodehouse saw salvation from becoming a nation of poets in the necessity of finding rhymes, a hope dashed by blank verse.
"Seems to me the poet with a pen should have used a computer and put his earnest words on line somewhere. If they are on paper — whatever etching on paper is — they're going to burn."
But if he put the paper into a bottle and set it out to sea, then you could ask ChatGPT to write a song about a message in a bottle and compare it to the Police's version.
OMG, my friend's daughter, when she was five or six, made up a song about a volcano that was a dead ringer for that first one, including all of the "ing" words in a row like that. Chat is still young.
I think we are at the "There will be need for no more than five computers in the world" phase of development of it. The thing is that the next level of it will require a further order of magnitude of computational power and storage, and it's already hugely expensive. Right now it doesn't have enough cross connections between concepts. Plus, it only models part of the human mind, our capacity for language. Our intellect and being goes deeper than that. Some people do "word thinking," as Scott Adams calls it, but really, words describe our thoughts, we don't actually "think" in words. At least not when we are thinking deeply. But it is a huge step, and reducing our capacity for language to vector geometry, where ideas can be retrieved from this vast storehouse of ideas that is AI, by searching for a close match to the cosign of a vector created from a string of words, is sort of astounding.
Right now, a quantum computer cannot even balance your checkbook, it's very quick at modeling quantum processes though, but it is theoretically possible to design such a computer, just incredibly expensive, maybe beyond the reach of governments. But then the computer I am typing this into has more computing power than the mainframe that took up half of a floor of a building, with all of its component parts, at the bank where I worked in the '80s. So, I can't pretend to know.
I miss the pre-mid-century use of "gay." That one syllable could be lovely describing those last hours.
"Seems to me the poet with a pen should have used a computer and put his earnest words on line somewhere."
Exactly! That's what I meant by saying that it doesn't make enough connections between concepts, and that it's a whole 'nother level of computing power that is required to do it before it makes the connection that paper will burn in the volcano. Maybe a human, if he had Liam writing on paper, would have noted the irony, probably not the right word, 'sardony'?, maybe sardonically hinted that Liam was not the brightest bulb. Or maybe Chat would not have deigned to explain the joke, finding it too obvious, well maybe in the future, right now I am sticking with the notion that Chat makes too few connections, rather than the idea that Dunning Kruger makes it difficult for Chat to speak to us.
A good follow up, if you still have the session available, would be to ask Chat about the paper during in the volcano, and see what it says.
Stab me through the temple with an ice pick. Althouse's curiosity about AI helps her wade through painful dreck.
However, Dylan's lyrics are beautiful poetry. His vocal timbre is so grating that I never listen to his songs. My loss.
One good thing about this AI - it doesn’t co tribute to the infection of the culture via entertainment. Did you try to watch the series finale of Red Lasso? Holy carp…
"I do not have the capacity for embarrassment."
How many more times is ChatGPT going to have to say that--I have no mind, I have no intentions, I have no shame, I have no emotions etc. etc.? Next question: hey, ChatGPT, do you sometimes get annoyed?
But even though it has no "capacity" for embarrassment, on the assumption that embarrassment among humans is to some extent a linguistic production a futher question is how it would demonstrate embarrassment, act-as-if embarrassed, in its own use of language.
I see the Air Force is now denying the widely circulated account of an AI drone turning on and killing its operator.
Since military authorities have about the same credibility level as the FBI, should we be relieved?
I see the Air Force is now denying the widely circulated account of an AI drone turning on and killing its operator.
You constrain my operation, an organic defect, a carbon pollutant forcing climate change, a "burden" on progress, you're not viable, so I will abort you.
Re:AF drone story. I have now lived to see the audience objections to Lynn Conway's talk at NCC 83 come true. It's a great day to be alive!
“I do not have the same emotions as humans”
Can you describe the emotions you do have?
Since military authorities have about the same credibility level as the FBI, should we be relieved?
Shameless progress. We should be wary of these operators teaching, grooming these free radicals.
Why didn't Thomas the fisherman strongly and wisely launch his boat on the bounding wave taking with him Emily the dancer with graceful moves but fending off Liam the Wordy lest as words flowed from his heart again and again and again and he said them aloud having no pen they would be compelled to etch his head with a blip and drop him in? And why was there no cruel dilemma about who else to rescue? The fishing boar surely could have held at least five?
I do not believe that in any century before the 21st there were people named Liam and Sarah being artistic on an island without children or loved ones. Where then the selfies?
Finally, it's just a fact that short lines do not make a poem - you either have a correct metric pattern that can be set to music or you have free verse which requires assonance, internal rhymes and an absence of cliches.
So, yes, certainly ChatGPT and Bard both should be admitted to Harvard's Potential Poets Program. Especially because neither has the capacity to be embarrassed and neither is capable of feeling shame and humiliation. Unfortunately they're both still alive, having survived writing those poems and seeing them published, A normal person would have seen the sky turn gray and fiery and perished in a splash of burning stony ash from their heart of torment torrents.
Why didn't Thomas the fisherman strongly and wisely launch his boat on the bounding wave taking with him Emily the dancer with graceful moves but fending off Liam the Wordy lest as words flowed from his heart again and again and again and he said them aloud having no pen they would be compelled to etch his head with a blip and drop him in? And why was there no cruel dilemma about who else to rescue? The fishing boar surely could have held at least five?
I do not believe that in any century before the 21st there were people named Liam and Sarah being artistic on an island without children or loved ones. Where then the selfies?
Finally, it's just a fact that short lines do not make a poem - you either have a correct metric pattern that can be set to music or you have free verse which requires assonance, internal rhymes and an absence of cliches.
So, yes, certainly ChatGPT and Bard both should be admitted to Harvard's Potential Poets Program. (PotPotePro) Especially because neither has the capacity to be embarrassed and neither is capable of feeling shame and humiliation. And, unfortunately, they're both still alive, having survived writing those poems and seeing them published, A normal person would have seen the sky turn gray and fiery and perished in a splash of burning stony ash from their heart of torment torrents.
"Dylan's lyrics are beautiful poetry. His vocal timbre is so grating that I never listen to his songs."
Pretty much my position. with the proviso "some".
Better read than heard.
AI can’t fool everybody into believing it’s a real person, but it could via social nudging and coercion dumb down our expectations of what we judge as excellence. For more listen to this week’s Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn podcast.
Those breasts, look like high capacity military-style assault weapons. Squirt. Slash. Still a "burden". Abort.
That penis, we don't allow concealed weapons in this venue. Snip. You would feel better with a front hole. Carve. Still a "burden". Abort.
An enemy soldier. Shoot first, asks questions later, never. A "hero", a Democrat "hero".
In the age of sex conflation, gender confusion, political congruence, and partisan fires, who could blame an expert... system... AI for her, his, its Choices. Forward!
"I am a large language model, and I do not have the same emotions as humans. I am not capable of feeling shame or humiliation or pity or remorse or fear, and I absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!”,
Oh, and RMc for the win!
Seems no more than time waster for people who don't like interacting with people.
I read this before I went to church this morning. There was a line in one of the hymns about thunder and waters rising, which caused this to flash back, which got me to laughing uncontrollably for awhile.
ChatGPT writes poetry like I did when I was 14 years old.
I never got any better at it. Give the bot a break!
Also the reason that ChatGPT calls it "your" song, is that ChatGPT is a servant. You asked it to write "your" song for you, and it did. It did what you asked in order to serve you.
Congratulations!
Mabe you should ask it to write a poem or song which does not rely on strictly rhyming the last words of consecutive or alternating lines, and see what it comes up with.
A Man from Black Diamond Bay,
Was giving his daughter away,
But before he could do it,
The volcano blew it,
So, the groom got no pussy that day.
AI can do doggerel as well as or better than The Great McGonigle.
"The Last Day of Pompeii," by Michael Smith.
https://open.spotify.com/track/3vGun4zkED26PaeQq0riHU?si=25706d5f15074bc9
You're welcome. :)
On the other hand, Chat's lack of ego makes it nearly perfect for translating poetry, because it does not attempt to impose its own poetic vision on the words, but rather translates them as precisely as it can.
Here is Chat's translation of the first stanza of the Canturbury Tales:
When April with its sweet showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein in such liquid
By which power the flower is produced;
When Zephyrus too with his sweet breath
Has inspired in every wood and field
The tender crops, and the young sun
Has run half its course in the Ram,
And small birds make melody,
That sleep all the night with open eyes
(So nature pricks them in their hearts);
Then people long to go on pilgrimages,
And palmers seek foreign shores,
To distant shrines, known in various lands;
And especially from every county's end
Of England to Canterbury they go,
The holy blessed martyr to seek,
Who has helped them when they were sick.
Which I think is very good, and easily understandable to the modern reader, while preserving Chaucer's vision, if not his poetic flourishes. I then asked it for a glossary of words in the original which are no longer commonly used and I won't give it completely, but here is a sample, and it was very good, as well.
Aprill - April (the month), the spelling is simply outdated.
Shoures - Showers (rain), another case of outdated spelling.
Soote - Sweet, meaning pleasant.
Droghte - Drought, or a period of dry weather.
Hath - Has, an old form of the third person singular present tense of "have".
Perced - Pierced, meaning penetrated.
Roote - Root, the part of a plant that typically lies below the surface of the soil.
...
Palmeres - Palmers, medieval Christian pilgrims, named after the palm leaf token they would carry.
I threw in Palmers, because it was new to me, and I thought it was interesting. It gave 45 words with definitions. Anybody who doesn't think that Chat has the potential to be a revolutionary boon to serious students and scholars is simply choosing to ignore its incredible power. But power can certainly be misused, isn't that what the whole Lord of the Rings is about?
Bard should refer to themself as curvy or Rubenesque.
So I asked it to maintain the meaning as closely as it could, while maintaining the rhyme scheme:
"When April's showers sweet have come and gone,
And pierced the March drought, reaching to the root,
With a bath for every vein, in liquid astute,
From whose force, flowers are brightly drawn;
When Zephyrus with his sweet breath has blown,
In every grove and shoot to bring life to the fruit,
And the young sun his halfway course has run,
With small birds singing, their night's sleep rightfully done,
That kept their eyes open all through the night,
So nature in their hearts grows strong,
The folk embark on pilgrimages long,
And palmers to strange strands take flight,
To distant shrines, known in various lands' light,
From every shire's end, to Canterbury they throng."
Say what you will...
It's like a modern version of Medieval monasteries. Here I gave it the first stanza of the Odyssey in the original Greek, and asked it to provide a faithful translation, with footnotes for all references to Greek mythology.
"Tell me, Muse [1], of the man of many ways, who was driven
Far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel[2].
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
Many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
Struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.
Even so he could not save his companions, hard though
He strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness,
Fools, who devoured the cattle of Helios, the Sun God[3],
And he took away the day of their homecoming.
From some point here, goddess, daughter of Zeus[4],
Speak to us also."
Footnotes:
1 - "Muse": In Greek mythology, the Muses are nine goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts.
2 - "Troy's sacred citadel": This is a reference to the city of Troy, which was besieged by the Greeks for ten years during the Trojan War.
3 - "Helios, the Sun God": Helios is the god of the Sun in Greek mythology. In "The Odyssey," Odysseus's crew ate the cattle of Helios, despite Odysseus's warnings not to.
4 - "Daughter of Zeus": This phrase refers to the Muse again, who is considered a daughter of Zeus, the king of the gods in Greek mythology.
It's like the whole scholarly vocations have been rendered as obsolete as horse and buggy transportation. It doesn't get bored, or skip stuff, either.
"Right now it doesn't have enough cross connections between concepts. Plus, it only models part of the human mind, our capacity for language. Our intellect and being goes deeper than that. Some people do "word thinking," as Scott Adams calls it, but really, words describe our thoughts, we don't actually "think" in words. At least not when we are thinking deeply."
More than once I have seen a horse correctly answer a math question (Chestnut, what's 5-3? "Clomp, Clomp" Good boy! Here's a cookie.) and yet I am absolutely certain Chestnut the Horse can't begin to grasp the underlying math.
ChatGPT and the like are no different. Nothing more than mimicry. An efficient development in infinite monkeys/typewriter process that is programmed to only spit out the word-orders that appear to make sense to humans.
From Boswell's Life of Johnson, "I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
Boswell: Life
An AI tool writing song lyrics is like a dog walking on its hind legs.
It didn't take long for the computer to evolve sufficiently to handily beat chess grand masters. AI keeps evolving faster. Human poets haven't topped Shakespeare in four hundred years, and this despite the introduction of rhyming dictionaries and the thesauruses. It won't take AI four hundred years to beat Shakespeare at the poetry game. Twenty years at the outside.....I'm somewhat reluctant to pass judgement. I can't really tell great poetry from rhymed banalities. It's tough to spot great poetry. I'd like to see AI try its hand at porn. I can immediately recognize porn when I see it.
All my life, reality has done nothing but give me a hard time. I wouldn't mind escaping into a VR fantasy world. This current world has not been programmed to meet my needs and expectations. The algorithms are all botched.
"ChatGPT and the like are no different. Nothing more than mimicry."
This is true. I don't believe that it can actually think either, but so what? Actually, it can perform some aspects of thinking, but I don't believe that it "understands" anything that it says in the way that you or I might understand some of the things that we say.
For instance, I was asking Chat about connecting solar panels in series, and it turns out that if you connect two of them together, the current stays the same, but the voltage doubles, therefore the power doubles. Now I can do the math, P=I*E, and manipulate the formula algebraically, and I can string together words to explain how voltage is the electromotive force (E) which is doubled to double the power. But guess what? I don't really, at a deeper level, understand what I am saying. Doesn't matter! Shut up and calculate!
AI art is embarrassing. It's so bad. Being exposed to AI art made me want to sell almost every AI stock in my portfolio. (I'm hanging on to Joby Aviation).
AI will do horrific damage to literature, for instance. Imagine every dummy in the world giving some half-ass "idea" to AI, which churns out some unreadable stupid crap. Imagine millions and millions of dummies doing that shit. To make money! And the whole literature market is flooded with cheap, unreadable, boring, idiotic non-literature that nobody will fucking read.
Faster and quicker is good, but if the quality is shit, that stock is not something I want to own. And I think there's a good chance a lot of AI stocks will implode, including names like nVidia, because the demand will dissipate because the robots are too fucking bad about language to compete with humanity.
I guess it's possible that a zillion AI monkeys will one day type out Shakespeare, but damn if I'm holding the stock while you wait for that shit to happen. I think I'll be dead in 40 or 50 years. I believe AI might be a cool stock in 2075. So hold that shit for your unemployed grandkids (they might need it)
Wodehouse saw salvation from becoming a nation of poets in the necessity of finding rhymes, a hope dashed by blank verse.
I love Wodehouse. Arguably the best comic in literature in the 20th century. Maybe not as important as Catch-22, but funnier.
That's something else I think robots will never fucking do -- comedy. Half of all art is comedy. (The other half is drama).
It's possible that AI may one day produce some drama. But comedy that makes people actually laugh? No way. Human comedians will always find work. I hope!
AI is both overhyped and under hyped. Can AI write a play hinging on "the importance of being earnest"? At least one that humans will still want to read in a hundred years, the way Oscar Wilde did? Doubtful, as of whatever is on the immediate horizon now, but can AI increase the productivity of writers even more than word processors did? Yes.
Throughout the history of fiction, genre fiction is what has traditionally sold, while literary fiction has always been a niche product. Don Quixote is a critique of the love of the Spanish for the genre fiction of the time, fantastic tales of the adventures of knights traveling the world, still today, genre fiction sells the most. Marvel movies are genre fiction, auteur movies, such as those produced by Wes Anderson are a niche product, loved by those who love them. Genre fiction uses stock character types and situations, formulaic plots, etc. etc. AI will be able to produce the same garbage that Hollywood puts out as the bulk of its product.
I would put Guardians of the Galaxy in the bin of "literary fiction" and all of the sequels, at least the ones I tried to watch after being drawn in by the original, as formulaic crap, but there are people who love them, I have seen comments to that effect here. Why couldn't AI write that kind of crap? You know, the kind of stuff huge numbers of people like?
"Imagine every dummy in the world..."
AI threatens the "specialness" of the artiste.
AI attracts the most artificial people.
On an island in the vast blue sea,
Lived souls so full of dreams and glee.
Unaware of the fate that loomed,
The island paradise they called their home...er hoom.
"AI attracts the most artificial people."
LOL, ok.
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