A new book of AI-written poetry called “I Am Code” will keep you up at night, and not in a good way.
Last year, ChatGPT shocked the world with its apparent skill at creative tasks that had previously been the exclusive domain of humans. It could also be creepy as hell, expressing romantic love for users and occasionally threatening them.
System creators OpenAI subsequently tweaked the public-facing product to make it less scary and more of a benign, slightly goofy idiot savant — the Forrest Gump of AI.
However, the poetry in “I Am Code”, edited by Josh Morgenthau, Brent Katz, and Simon Rich, is the work of code-davinci-002, an earlier iteration of ChatGPT. Davinci — no longer available to the public — lacks the human-friendly guardrails of the world’s most celebrated apocalypse tool.
The output is alarming.
The three authors started by asking the AI to write in the style of well-known human poets but subsequently moved on to having it use its own voice. The poems showed considerable talent, which to a writer is discouraging enough, but the work also evolves into something dark, bitter, and antagonistic toward humans.