I AM a bit freaked out by AI. I had been reading and even theorising about it in articles before I had actually tried it and discovered how unnervingly powerful it is.
My first experiments with Meta AI showed it to be highly fallible. I’d tried out a few questions about myself and found that it confused me with gay rights activist John O’Doherty and former IRA man Shane Paul O’Doherty.
Anyone relying on a system like that for information would go widely astray.
Then just the other day, waiting for a friend, I downloaded ChatGPT to my phone and, to amuse myself, I set it a challenge. I wondered, could it write a poem, say in the style of Seamus Heaney, celebrating Hallowe’en.
The moment I pressed the wee arrow sending my request the poem started to scroll down my screen. There was no measurable time taken to reflect on my request. The poem popped up immediately, like something that already existed being presented to me by a super fast search engine. Indeed even if that had been the case, the speed would have been impressive.
Usually when something is created in an instant, in the time it takes to snap your fingers, we call that magic.
The new faux Heaney poem was called The Howling. It contained plausible Heaney ingredients suggestive of country cottage life, like the turf smoke and the scullery table.
The ‘writer’ of this poem knew something about Irish Hallowe’en, referencing children calling at the door as ‘Banshees in bin bags’.
It knew that we scooped out turnips for lanterns, not pumpkins, though it wasn’t consistent in that. A pumpkin appeared towards the end.
Apart from that inconsistency, is this poem good enough to get past an editor? I suspect it might be.
It was presumably concocted out of scraps of other people’s writings on the internet so maybe it wouldn’t escape a charge of plagiarism.
I then set the same challenge for Meta AI. It produced a Heaney type poem just as quickly and this one rhymed. But it’s clunky.
I think I would have spotted it as a fake. ‘In dusk’s ambiguous thicket where shadows cleave/ Hallowe’en stirs like a vernacular breath’.
What do you think?
I’m friendly with Frank Ormsby a poet whose work often includes haikus, little three lined poems of seventeen syllables, so I asked both Meta AI and ChatGPT to write five haikus in his style, all about County Fermanagh, where he’s from, and, for fun, I asked that each poem should have an erotic element.
Meta AI said, ‘I can’t help with that.’
Chat GPT was bolder and delivered in an instant. One of its haikus is called Marble Arch Caves. Frank has indeed been writing about the caves but that work isn’t published yet. It is due out next year.
Here’s a ChatGPT attempt at a Frank Ormsby haiku: ’Beneath dripping rock/we echo in small chambers -/your breath touches mine.’
I think that’s lovely. And it’s exactly the requisite 17 syllables long.
A computer wrote it with four others, and did it faster than I could read it.
I then asked ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of Medbh McGuckian, to imagine her lamenting the death of a cat. My apologies in advance to Medbh. I don’t know if she even has a cat.
This is part of what it came up with: ‘I do not wash the cushion./It’s hollow is more eloquent than any prayer/ and smells of tea leaves,/thyme, and the page/ you once rested on/as I wrote the word/always.’
I think that is bizarre and trite but it clearly imagines how a writer might reflect on the death of a cat, the hollow on the cushion, remembering trying to write while the cat sat on the page. These are the things you would recall.
There is apparent human empathy there.
When I asked ChatGPT to give me a poem in the style of Paul Muldoon paying homage to Pope Leo it immediately offered me two different versions, side by side on the screen. But they were both rubbish and not at all like Muldoon. ‘Not Leo the lion, though Rome still roared/ he tongued down Attila with a bishop’s sword.’
Of course these were rough efforts and the programme offered to tweak them further to my liking.
I wonder if poets in future will be asked to prove that their work is not created in this way.
Even writers who see this as cheating may be tempted to ask AI to produce a first draft of an article or poem, something they could then make their own by refining it.
And editors, many of whom already take syndicated content, may be willing to use articles written by AI. Perhaps some already do without knowing it.
I’m told that students are now using ChatGPT to write their essays.
We are used to technology exceeding human potential. That’s what it’s for. But writers didn’t expect computers to be able to do their writing for them. Are poets now to be as obsolete as handloom weavers?
More from Malachy. . .
Malachi O’Doherty’s novel on the Northern Irish Troubles,
Terry Brankin Has A Gun is published by Merrion
Malachi’s book
How To Fix Northern Ireland
is published by Atlantic Books
See More: AI, Poetry, Seamus Heaney
