more AI poetry

a second attempt with a much better GTP3 interface, this timing using the newly released Chat-GTP

using the prompt, can you write a rhyming poem about the creative process of writing poetry itself?

As I sit and think and ponder,
I let my thoughts just wander.
I search for words that sound just right,
To craft a poem that takes flight.

I play with rhyme and meter too,
To give my words a musical hue.
I edit and revise, again and again,
Until my poem takes shape and then.

With each stroke of the pen,
I bring my thoughts to life within.
A jumble of words and phrases,
Transformed into a work of art that amazes.

The creative process may be slow,
But the end result is worth the toil.
A poem that sings and dances,
A treasure that will last for ages.

...getting better. will soon experiment with half written poems and seeing if it can finish them in the same style

update: ...no, it's fucking abysmal. best you can do is come up with a ridiculous premise and ask for something in that vein because then the surreality of the premise becomes the entertainment, whereas the execution is always utterly derivative, as you'd expect, being trained on the world`s text, which reduce to an average. the best you can hope for is a numbers game where you put enough weird shit into it and keep it generating and iterating and it occasionally churns out an "original" turn of phrase by chance.

parasite

the worst bit about parasites is that they become part of us. they get inside and it becomes difficult to get them out without taking a part of ourselves with them, leading to a strange and awful combination of loss aversion that makes you hesitant to tear them out, and self-alienation that makes you feel less like yourself. when an enemy has got inside, there's always sacrifice, whether you have to cut out a hunk of your flesh or scorch part of your home. parasites also tend to evade detection; to camouflage, confuse and hide. sometimes they permanently become part of you. did you know, roughly 10% of our DNA is viral? from hundreds of millions of years of co-evolution with animals, little remnants that migrated into our genes and managed to stay.

There was a time i was full of parasites...

The bugs in my bed,
they would come out at night,
get under the sheets with me
and sup from my blood,
while i dreamt of drowning 
in a crunchy sea of little exoskeletons.
So i didn't sleep.

The bugs in my dick,
they would lie and wait
until i was weak
and then they'd come out
just under the frenulum, like an evil flower
and make me afraid to ever touch again,
to ever reach out, to even start talking.

So i resigned myself to always be alone.

The bugs in my ear,

they had banged too hard and degraded my drum,

so the surgeon had to throw it away

and fashion one new from some nearby material,

but i knew beyond doubt that the bugs were still there,
waiting for weakness
to come round again.

The surgery had failed.
So i stopped listening.

The bug in my heart,
it had worn through my spirit

after years of loving; chronically and terminally,
this parasitoid that yearned for me so,
and wanted - demanded - that i stay, stay, stay,
when more than anything i needed to be free.

But the bug had connived such complete menticide,

manipulating my mind beyond authenticity and self-preservation,
to the point of dishonesty and self-deception.
So i dug my heels in deeper.

The bugs in my brain,
they'd scuttle round the gyri and sulci of my cortex,
while i lay in bed till the late afternoon,
and re-mind me of how paralysed i was.
"yes, you're trapped", they'd say, over and over
"and how are you going to get out?"
"i don't know", i'd say, wanting it all to just melt away
"we know a way", they'd say.
So i made some plans, just in case.

parasites will wait till you're at your weakest to strike

they're brutal like that
they don't give a fuck

your weakness is their time to shine

and start taking up residence in your most private of places

you'll come back home, exhausted

and they're sitting in your favourite chair

they're eating all the food in your fridge

they're fucking your wife and having all the fun

i eventually got out of this downward spiral
i burned my bed and half of my possessions
i found people who understood
i got a hearing aid and i let people cater to me
i severed the ties and stood on my own
i threw away the plans and got rid of the implements

i cut out the contaminated flesh and gave myself time to heal

i knew i would never be the same again

but also, i knew that wouldn't stop me

Childhood Memory 4

To repeat a consistent message of this series of childhood memories: we should hold on to them before they fleet, because they offer us insight into earlier versions of ourselves, before the many augmenting masks of age have developed over our nascent form. For as these layers calcify, for reasons better or worse, they cloak that initial trajectory, such that after mask upon mask of development, we lose sight of our origin, and in doing so forget part of ourselves. In doing so we forget ourselves. When we don't record we have no reference, and while all recall of memory is a reworking, to formalise it is to resist the erasure that is so often the temptation of our unconscious instincts. So perhaps, if trauma allows, we should be careful not to scrub our childhood memories to the point of sanitizing them beyond recognition, let alone sweep them under the rug like unwanted dust. They tell us something about ourselves: our fears and insecurities, our deeper impulses and desires, and this is useful information if we are to learn about ourselves, to know ourselves, to be ourselves, as per the advice of the delphic existentialists.

Like the time Mrs Rose* the cover teacher filled in for Mrs Pedone in Year 2 (thus placing the class within the range of 6-7 years old). She opened a book to read from a selection of stories we had been working through and was going through the titles one by one. At each, the children would chorus some kind of disappointment, having already heard the story. The class was getting very noisy and i was getting very bored. Mrs Rose questioned the class about another of the stories and in my boredom I volunteered at high volume "WE'VE HAD THAT ONE AND WE DIDN'T LIKE IT!" I remember scrunching up my eyes as I said it. I must have said it very loudly indeed because there was an immediate lull in the room as it became apparent some transgression had occurred. The obligatory "ommm...", worked it's way like a fire around the room: like a prepubescent incantation. Mrs Rose, for the most part a lovely old lady - switched - and became authoritative, keen to weed out this outburst and restore order to the class. "Who said that!?" She demanded. At once the entire room of 20-30 kids, all cross legged and jam-packed on the bobbly red carpet with me in the centre, swung their arms in my direction, their accusing, precise, and unequivocal fingers outstretched, forming a crop-circle of little limbs, all pointing in at me as its epicentre. In a pathetic and desperate attempt to defer blame onto someone other than myself, I had stuck my lone finger out at the kid next to me: one lone voice in a sea of accusation. My face went red. I don't think I even brought myself to make eye contact with Mrs Rose. I honestly had not meant her any personal affront, but I had got impatient with the whole scenario. Someone had to say something and cut through the natter and murmuring and indecision, and now that had backfired dramatically.

I have returned to this moment of my life more than any other and i still burn with embarrassment when i think of it. Why so? I realised the other day, that this represents my biggest fears: to be found out, to be shunned, to be made an outsider, to have made a fool of myself in front of everyone and be rejected by all, to lose the respect of my peers.

*Yet another time we had Mrs Rose cover a class, a boy whose name escapes me, answered the register with "Yes, Mrs Rosebush!", provoking a similar reaction, although fingers weren't necessary in rooting out the culprit on that occasion, as he had boldly/stupidly put his opinion directly to his name. Despite the ensuing scolding, i remember being impressed by the word-play and endearing myself to this otherwise distant student.

Sprezzatura

we are what we repeatedly do, 
even what we pretend to be

i tried so hard at not trying

that it became easier to just go ahead and try
and so i tried and tried
so hard i wasn't even thinking about trying or not trying any more

*

all pursuance of authenticity is contrived
and contrivance itself is a form of authenticity
wherein attempts to be real are false, really
but falsehoods can be layered so thick
that they form a solid sediment
one that comprises a foundation 

a fundamental fabric of our psychic world

*

forgive me for not being able to forgive
the performances of false teachers and true charlatans

and the trumpeting troubadours that lead us nowhere

all singing and all dancing
enchanting us with the belief

that hard work is easy
all words and whimsy
all prophet's koan and jester's riddle

all pre-re-hearsed off-the-cuff sweat-less toil

*

everything worth anything in this world is effort

even all the stuff that isn't
either/or, just graft and commit
and churn that milk into butter

Terrible AI-generated poetry (GPT-3)

AI instruction:

a rhyming poem about the creative process of writing poetry itself

these were the best of the bunch and the only one that rhymed for more than a couplet:

i think that i shall never see

a poem lovely as a tree

perhaps poems are not as lovely as trees

maybe poems are just like trees

they need the right environment in order to grow and thrive

the best poems come from the heart

the best poems are filled with love

the best poems make you feel like you are flying on a cloud up above

* * * * *

We all have something special to say,

Should we let it out, or keep it at bay?

Our thoughts and emotions, should we share?

Or keep them to ourselves, and go nowhere?

poems are written from the heart,

And they have a way of finding their way to the stars.

A laboratory ghost story (written by AI)

not uploading anything for a frustratingly long time, mainly due to other passions and preoccupations getting in the way. recently a friend asked me what i thought about AI generated writing and i said something along the lines of, well its only as good as what you put in, and if thats large data sets of publicly available text, then its really just a sort of lowest common denominator regurgitation of public consciousness. in short, probably not very good and likely to reproduce the same hackneyed phrasing and lacklustre verbiage, as well as the prejudiced biases that permeate the verses of the web.

on the other hand, i said i think mostly its not used to generate whole pieces, but used as a tool to get you through writers block by generating some garbled garbage that might nevertheless, through sheer complexity of the process and volume of output, stimulate something better in your own head. maybe we can treat it as another addition to toolkit, sitting next to the good old dictionary and thesaurus. maybe it's analogous to the optical projection techniques that helped renaissance artists trace onto canvas, bringing with it the whiff of "cheating". until of course everyone was doing it and people moved on.

i mentioned students already writing essays a while ago using GPT-2 and the problems this gives universities, particularly as its not even straight plagiarism, but never the less "not your own work". interestingly, spelling correction, programs like grammarly and the good old dicthaurus are all ok, so eventually someone is going to have to re-draw that line again. i'd like to think it will lead to a questioning of the benefits of exams and tests in general, but perhaps they'll just wind it all the way back to desks in a hall with pen and paper, who knows.

my friend pointed out that GPT-3 has been out for a while with GPT-4 on the way, which with additional machine learning (ML) power might up the quality of the output and enable generation of entire texts. i see huge potential in the general work in ML (including all sorts of problems too, with William Gibson coming to mind "technology is neutral until its applied" and all that), but of my friend it did beg the question "is it just that you don't want to learn how to write better?" to his credit, my friend admitted that yes, he struggled to write and didn't enjoy the bit at school where they wanted you to consider structure and the "bureaucracy" of writing, which "took the fun out of writing". i sympathised, having felt the same at one point, but having eventually come back to that bureaucracy upon realising that there was no need for me to reinvent every technique/structure handed down to us through the literary generations, and also that this is impossible for any mere mortal, should they even like to do so. my friend then added, chuckling, that perhaps this desire to auto-generate stories was maybe, possibly, a little bit, just laziness.

i respect that honesty and in light of not having written creatively for months, thought, i wondered if i could task an automaton with filling in for me for a bit. maybe i could leave the babysitter to churn out some words for me without me putting in the effort. maybe i can switch to autopilot for a bit while i finish my fucking thesis, which unfortunately carries an originality that places its creation well beyond the scope of AI write-bots. with that in mind, i've tried to auto-generate some text, based on an idea i had a while ago about a ghost story set in a lab. the idea here, using HyperWriteAI, is to write a sentence or so answering the question "what do you want me to write?", adding enough detail and in such a way, that the output makes some sense. HyperWriteAI gives you a selection of outputs, you pick the best one, and it adds it to a cumulative piece of text. you give it the next prompt, and it goes on. For example, i ask HyperWriteAI to write me a ghost story in a lab and the best of the four looks like this:

Rikiya Takayama was a Japanese scientist who specialized in plant physiology. In the 1930s, he invented a scientific experiment that allowed him to temporarily revive dead plants. He would often do this in front of his students, and he even went as far as to do this in front of Emperor Hirohito. He named this technique "resurrection fern." Eventually, the media got a hold of this story, and Takayama began to be nicknamed the "ghost scientist."

ok, so this wasn't really what i asked for but i kinda like the idea anyway. i fuck around a little more with the "AI". a second attempt:

It was a dark and stormy night. Phillip had been working in the lab for hours, trying to replicate the results of his previous experiments. But no matter what he did, he kept getting the same result. The futility of it all was driving him to near madness.

Phillip was just about to give up when he heard a noise coming from within the room. He froze, not sure what to do. Was someone else in the lab with him? He slowly turned around, trying to be as quiet as possible.

Hey Phil, what are you still doing here? His lab partner, Jessica, asked him. He had been so engrossed he hadn't even heard the door opening. Jessica laid a hand on his shoulder and he felt a chill come over him. Oh you're so cold, he said, trying to cover the warble in his voice. She laughed. Sorry, i didn't mean to scare you. Are you still working on the same thing? It's been days hasn't it? She asked. Weeks, actually, Philip replied. However I change the parameters I get the same result staring back at me, it makes no sense. It's like the machine is being guided by an invisible hand, bringing me back to the same answer that I know can't be.

That's doesn't sound very scientific! Jessica mocked. He looked hurt. You're just spooked, she corrected. All these long nights are probably getting to you. Anyway, I was about to head out. You should probably do the same. Look at it with a set of fresh eyes tomorrow. Are you coming?

I think i'm just going to do a little long. Run the samples one more time, Philip murmured, mostly to himself. Suit yourself. Just remember to take regular breaks, yeah? you got this, she chirped sympathetically. He listened to the clatter of her shoes echo down the corridor, trailing off into obscurity until the hum of the apparatus took over once more. 

Philip put his ear to the machine, willing it to give him the answers he sought. Suddenly, the machine gave a loud beep, right in his ear. Phillip jerked back painfully and cupped his ear. Now the machines want to add injury to insult, he thought. 

That's when he heard the voice.

"Feed"

ok, so that was a lot better, although it wasn't all automated. Still, lets see where we can go with this... 

noise pollution

some studies on the topic:

• Night noise exposure and risk of death by suicide in adults living in metropolitan areas (2018)
• Occupational Noise Annoyance Linked to Depressive Symptoms and Suicidal Ideation: A Result from Nationwide Survey of Korea (2014)
• Noise exposure and public health (2000)
• Noise pollution: non-auditory effects on health (2003)
• The association between noise exposure and blood pressure and ischemic heart disease: a meta-analysis (2002)
• A Review of Environmental Noise and Mental Health (2000)
• Road traffic noise and psychiatric disorder: prospective findings from the Caerphilly Study (1996)
• Association between occupational noise and vibration and anxiety in the South Korean working population: a cross-sectional study (2022)
• Chronic aircraft noise exposure, stress responses, mental health and cognitive performance in school children (2001)

if you stop 

and listen 

you can hear the world
wailing

cloaked by the convenience

of rushing locomotion

the arthritic screech of metal on metal

with the visceral grind of bone on bone

with all the shrieking and scraping of unlubricated friction

arrives at the platform, at the station, at the port

arrives at its destiny

at the tympanic membrane 

and bangs, bangs, bangs, bangs

on the drum of mental war

bailiff-like, on the door

evicting my more cherished thoughts

now blended in a whirlwind of flailing serrations

now subsumed by the eternal din

by the clandestine cacophony

of municipal mechanisations

trained on a twisted track

the ears are clogged with soot and slime

then pierced, like a pencil in the ear

like Phineas Gage's railroad spike

the self-inflicted, lobotomising radii of sonic weapons

if we could only tune in 

and turn the channel

from this acoustic pollution

that moves through us

almost flagrantly
as an open secret

as an unheard dirge

that nevertheless cuts

scalpel-like

across the mind

and this mind

that wants to sing

to make harmony with waves

hears only the chorus 

of a thousand tin men

screaming out their hearts

shredding the strings of their cords

into hoarse corrugated larynxes, irritated

by repeating the same forgotten plea

the same howling metallic mantra

we must learn to listen
to the sounds of the world

and heed the call 

of our suicidal wail

calling out for attention

attention

attention