The Study
--------------------------------------Chapter 2: Wrestling with the beast
Having been disappointed by the first experiment, I started slowly introducing more instructions into each prompt, to see how far I can stretch the chatbot’s ‘creative freedom’. After establishing a rhyming scheme and a general theme, I made my first request.
As usual, the product contained mentions of light, sound, and the environment. It was even nice enough to identify the rhyming scheme for me in brackets after each line. I also noticed that each poem was always accompanied by a title, which was always straight and to-the-point, directly referencing the content.
Despite the morbid theme, the bot somehow managed to come to an optimistic conclusion, noting how death is just a beginning and it happens to all of us. Unless specifically asked, the bot will always default to a positive tone, unless directly asked otherwise, which is what I did with my next prompt.
The result was near-identical to the last in all aspects, except it was, indeed, pessimistic like I had asked. This was enforced by the eerie title and 100 “no’s” that made it very clear that this was a negative poem. At this point I was getting tired of the whispers, the echoes, and the dark, which were getting shoved into every piece like a requirement.
I got curious at how the bot would do with an absence of a rhyming scheme, so I requested a free-verse poem.
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What was interesting about this, is that while I didn’t give it
a theme, it settled on one from my previous requests, where I
played around with haiku’s (spoiler!). The theme for those was
time and truth, which this piece followed quite faithfully. It
included all of the keywords I required in the other requests -
past, present, future, truth, and lie - splitting them into a
stanza each and simply defining them through metaphors and
personifications. The only downside is that the poem felt quite
random, with each stanza having little to do with the previous.
Although the sections themselves had a confined meaning, the
whole piece lacked continuity, and when read as whole, came
across as quite nonsensical. |