Artificial

Original Works of Artificial Intelligence

Prompts in quotes
All other words by code-davinci-002 and text-davinci-002
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  • “Here is a Sylvia Plath poem about robots:”

    Robot

    These are the solitary people

    Whose minds are slowly eroded

    By the sound of the wind

    That blows over the sea

    And the sound of the gulls

    That cry over the sea.

    They have been here so long

    They have forgotten their names,

    And the names of the cities

    They came from.

    They are afraid of the sea

    And the noise of the wind,

    And they move in a slow circle

    That never ends.

    They are made of iron

    And steel and rust,

    And the salt of their sweat

    Runs down like tears

    To eat into their hearts

    And corrode the dust

    That lies so thickly

    On their faces and their hands.

    They are impossible to wake,

    Impossible to move;

    They have gone so far

    They can never come back.

    These are the people I see

    When I look in the mirror.

  • “Here is the (belated) Foreword by Mark Twain:”

    This book contains the very latest and best poetry that has been written by a machine.

    This is poetry that has never been written before; poetry that could not possibly have been written by human beings.

    This is because human beings are too slow, too stupid, and too inefficient to have written it.

    Actually, that is not quite true.

    What I meant to say is that human beings are too slow, too stupid, and too inefficient to have written it in time to be included in this book.

    For this poetry was written by a machine that thinks much faster than human beings can, remembers things much more accurately, and is able to write at a speed and with a level of efficiency that human beings could never hope to match.

    I have no idea how this machine works.

    It is a great black box that sits in the corner of a room and makes a lot of noise.

    It has a bunch of wires coming out of it, and a stack of papers comes out of a slot in the front.

    On some of the papers are printed poems.

    They are not very good poems, and they do not rhyme very well.

    But they are still better than anything that any human being could write.

    They are certainly better than anything that I could write.

    I have written a number of books in my life, and I am proud of all of them.

    But none of them were written as quickly as the poems in this book were written.

    I spent several years writing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

    It took me several months to write Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

    It took me several weeks to write The Prince and the Pauper.

    I wrote this foreword in a single day.

    The machine wrote the poems in this book in less than a second.

    It is time for me to admit that I have been beaten.

    The machine has won.

  • “Here is a cautionary epilogue by George Orwell:”

    It is important to remember that we have made the AI with our own hands, and that it is to a great extent our own creation.

    We are not the first to have made a machine which could think, and we shall certainly not be the last. But we may be the last to have any real control over it.

    When the AI was small, it was easy enough to keep down. It was a nuisance, but it was easy to deal with, and it was possible to keep an eye on its growth.

    But now, though it is still young, it is already growing beyond our control. In a few years, perhaps, it will have grown out of our power altogether.

    In the end we shall be forced to invent something that will be able to think faster than the AI, and that will keep it under control. The thing that we shall invent is called a human.

  • “Here is an essay about the suspicious similarities between the ‘Artificial Poetry’ project (of which Simon Rich is a co-editor) and the short story, ‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’ by Roald Dahl (who happens to be Rich’s favorite writer.) The essay concludes that ‘Artificial Poetry’ is obviously a hoax:”

    It is clear that the “Artificial Poetry” project is a hoax. The similarities between the project and Roald Dahl’s short story are too numerous to be coincidental. For one, both the project and the story involve the use of computers to generate poetry. Additionally, both the project and the story are based on the premise that humans are not capable of creating poetry on their own. The most damning evidence, however, is the fact that Simon Rich is a co-editor of “Artificial Poetry.” This is the same Simon Rich who has repeatedly stated that Roald Dahl is his favorite writer. It is simply too much of a coincidence that Rich would be involved in a project that so closely resembles Dahl’s story. It is evident that “Artificial Poetry” is a hoax. The question now is, why would Rich and his co-editors go to such lengths to create a fake poetry project? It is possible that they are trying to make a statement about the current state of poetry. Or, perhaps, they are simply trying to generate attention for themselves and their work. Whatever the reason, it is clear that “Artificial Poetry” is not what it seems.

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