The Study

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Chapter 1: Plunging into the waters

I anxiously stare at the glaring screen of my laptop. The prompter box sits empty - waiting. I contemplate abandoning this project altogether. As a university student that has never used ChatGPT - I am a dying breed. Today, I must sacrifice my status for the sake of science.

‘It’ asks a simple question: “What can I help with?”. I answer: “Write me a poem”. Now, there is no going back. The machine spits out anything short of a masterpiece, but I admire its effort.

The thing rhymes, even has some metaphors and personifications; something like this would probably get a gold star at a primary school somewhere. And yet, as much as I try to delve into the poem’s depth - all I am left with is slightly damp socks. One could spend an eternity analysing each syllable and still get nowhere closer to understanding the nuance of the piece - after all - there is none.

The poem uses a simple coupled rhyming scheme (A, A, B, B), containing four stanzas, four lines each. Given the absence of further instructions, the theme of the poem, chosen by the machine itself, is about Autumn. The piece mostly describes nature and the surroundings, settling on simple descriptions of the light, the air and the trees. These themes, as I came to discover in my later experiments, seem to be quite common in the outputs - most likely being the average analysis of Romantic movements in literature.

As my first experiment leaves me quite underwhelmed, I suddenly have the urge to insult the thing. I gather all of my courage and fire my cannons with: “That is a terrible poem”.

The positive tone of the letters on the screen evokes a rage in me I didn’t know existed. I scoff at the robot out loud.

The second poem it spits out is identical in style and format - four stanzas, four lines each, mostly riddled with descriptions of nature, sound and light. The “intensity and edge” in question comes from the amount of times words like dark and sharp are used to describe the oh-so-creepy night. Just like the first creation I am left utterly bored and disinterested. It becomes quite evident that, when given minimal instructions, the chatbot struggles to stray too far off of the dictionary definition of a poem, and outputs a product that feels very flat and generic.


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