MoaCTaQ: ChatGPT, Nonsense, Regurts

ChatGPT has a lot to teach me about me.

Thursday, 2.9.23 we did another one of our every-other-Thursday poetry workshops on Zoom. The writing exercises we did were:

More of a Comment Than a Question #32

• List 50 things that have nothing to do with each other

• Write a poem that incorporates all of them

Read “The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

• List five ways your life would be different if you’d made different choices

• Write a poem about one of them

The first exercise is a bit of a departure from the way we usually do writing prompts but it turned out to be a great way to morph our brains into a more surreal place (so much so that when we read Nezhukumatathil’s poem after doing that exercise, everyone wasn’t prepared for its very linear storyline and the details of the narrative flew over everyone’s heads). Next time, I will pair that exercise with a Dean Young poem or some such.

One of our most regular participants, Elan Morgan, approached the exercise like this:

I could only get 25 words on my list, but I got them all in a poem that was actually attempting to be about carbon sequestration.

We also fooled around with ChatGPT and its uncharted outer reaches. I queried it about myself and it said this:

Robbie Q Telfer is a contemporary poet and performer, known for his work that explores themes of masculinity, identity, and cultural intersections. Some of his well-known poems include:

"A Love Letter To My Haters"

"The Man I Used To Be"

"A Guide To Being Black in America"

Robbie Q Telfer has written many poems throughout his career, and some of his other works include:

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Race"

"How To Be A Good Man"

"The Privilege of Ignorance"

"Where I'm From"

"The Fragility of Masculinity"

Reader, would it shock you to learn that I have NOT written any of those poems? I asked it to share some of the best lines:

One of the most quoted stanzas from Robbie Q Telfer's work is from his poem "The Man I Used To Be":

"I used to think that being a man meant being tough
That emotions were for women, and to show them was rough
But now I know that being a man is about being true
To all the parts of yourself, and the feelings you construe"

This stanza speaks to the theme of masculinity and the evolving understanding of what it means to be a man. Telfer's work often explores the intersections of identity, culture, and society, and this stanza is a powerful example of the messages he conveys in his poetry.

I mean, showing ones emotions IS rough. But it’s not all anthemic ballads from “Telfer,” I have been known to be, well, a bit of a JOKESTER.

Robbie Q Telfer is known for his thought-provoking and powerful poems, but he also has a sense of humor and has written poems that incorporate humor and lighter themes. Here is an example of one of his funnier poems:

"I Used To Be Cool

I used to be cool, man, I swear
I had style, I had flair
I had all the latest trends
And all my homies as friends

But now I wear dad jeans
And listen to classic rock and Queen
I drink decaf and eat bran
And sometimes I fall asleep during TV shows man"

This poem is an example of Telfer's humorous and lighthearted side, and it speaks to the theme of aging and changing perspectives.

So this is all very interesting to me, and not just because I can finally outsource my poetry writing to SkyNet. OpenAI has, somehow, programmed ChatGPT to just make shit up and acting like it is getting it from some real source (I checked, and these poems were not written by ANYONE, at least not via the late 20th Century technology known as Googlin’). Should be interesting when people plagiarize this completely invented reality, one where I have written a poem called “A Guide to Being Black in America.”

But maybe, like a plagiarizing high school student, it is just talking believably about the reading they were assigned but didn’t actually do, filling up just enough space to get their participation grade. Because they know the teacher is too tired to actually challenge them on their somewhat believable assertions. C’s get degrees, ChatGPT.

But even in the course of the conversation about myself, it seemed to be learning. I kept asking it for more poems I didn’t know I wrote, and I finally hit their limit.

Unfortunately, as a language model AI, I don't have access to all poems by Robbie Q Telfer. However, here is a poem that you may find interesting:

"The Universe Explains Itself"

The universe explains itself
In the way a river explains a riverbank,
By wearing it away.
And the universe wears us
Away too, every day,
In the same way a river wears away a riverbank.
The river doesn't care,
And neither does the universe.
But we care.
We care because we are the riverbank
And we feel the river's constant erosion.
We feel the universe wearing us away
Every day.
But we also feel the universe
Building us up,
Just as a river builds up a delta.
And one day, we'll be nothing
But silt and sand
And the universe will explain itself
In a different way.

The first poem of theirs that didn’t end-rhyme and, if I was told a High School student wrote it, I would believe it. So I asked ChatGPT who the author of this new kind of poem was. They said, “I apologize, that poem was written by Robbie Q Telfer.”

I, for one, welcome our new robot poemerlords.