Strange Poetry and ChatGPT

I should say as context that I had been having a conversation on Mastodon in which I got the idea to write a poem that was somehow both a haiku and a limerick. I wrote the following myself. (The ChatGPT part comes later.) I've numbered the lines to make it more intelligible:

   0   There once was a would-be haiku
   1   Wedged late in a lim'rick venue
   2   Ending a hero
   3   Numbered from zero
   4   Its lines went three, four and two

If it helps in understanding it, I went on to say in the other forum, the haiku to be extracted and rearranged is this one:

  Numbered from zero
   Its lines went three, four and two
    Ending a hero

But while I'm proud I was able to come up with anything that was both limerick and haiku, I have to admit it's a more boring haiku than I'd aspired to. So I later wondered if ChatGPT could help me do better. That's what led to the following odd exchange a few days ago, in which it's clear that ChatGPT can do amazing things in some ways, yet be hampered with sometimes the simplest of things in others.

I came to wonder through this if it even knows what a syllable is. Perhaps it has just seen so many haikus that it doesn't need to count, and when asked to write something similar to, but not the same as, a 5-7-5 haiku, it doesn't know what the goal is at all?

See what you think...

write a haiku about the beauty of a snowy day

Snowflakes dance down
Peaceful white blanket unfolds
Winter's pure delight

write a limerick in which the last three lines, if rearranged, would be syntactically valid as a haiku and in which the first two lines introduce that haiku.

In the park, a snowflake lands
A symbol of winter's grace
Peaceful, it descends
Covering earth's face with white
Nature's beauty in sight.

that isn't quite right. in a limerick, the first, second, and fifth line are long. so to embed a haiku in a limerick, the embedded haiku will have to use the form 5-5-7.

Note that the apology here is part of the limerick! Is that it being clever or just revealing it doesn't know the difference between the task and related meta-conversation?

Oh, my apologies, I see
Let me write it now correctly
A snowflake takes its flight
Brings peace to the winter night
In a dance of grace, so free.

Write a fresh 5-5-7 haiku, in other words with the long line being last.

Beneath a winter sky
Snowflakes gently fall like dreams
Peaceful and serene.

In a 5-5-7 haiku, the second and third lines are exchanged.

Gently falling snowflakes
Beneath a peaceful winter sky
Serene dreams descend.

No. It should say "Gently falling snowflakes. / Serene dreams descend / Beneath a peaceful winter sky." so that 5-5-7 describe the number of syllables in each line, 5 for line 1, 5 for line 2, and 7 for line 3.

Gently falling snowflakes,
Serene dreams descend,
Beneath a peaceful winter sky.

Yes, now modify the poem so the first and second lines rhyme.

Snowflakes fall, so gentle and light,
Peaceful dreams take flight in the night.
Beneath winter skies so serene,
Nature's beauty, a lovely scene.

But it should still be a 5-5-7 haiku.

Falling snowflakes, so pure,
Peaceful dreams that softly tour,
Beneath winter sky serene.

In a 5-5-7 haiku, there are 5 syllables for line 1, 5 syllables for line 2, and 7 syllables for line 3.

Snowflakes dance, so light and slow
Peaceful dreams, a winter's glow
Beneath the sky, so serene and bright.

That is a 7-7-9 haiku you wrote. Tighten it up into a 5-5-7 haiku by using fewer syllables.

Snowflakes twirl, light and slow
Dreams of peace, a winter's show
Beneath the sky, serene and bright.

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Author's Notes:

Thanks to Madeleine Begun Kane for writing a haiku about haikus and limericks and putting it on Mastodon, which inspired me to write my own original poem and to have the enclosed conversation.

It's fascinating out chance events like that influence our lives. My whole career has been littered with chance events that were as important as anything planned. (Programming language enthusists might enjoy my paper Common Lisp: The Untold Story, a record of an invited talk I gave at the 50th Anniversary of Lisp conference, where I recount a number of those. No, not in poetry form. Poetry, and especially a haiku, is a kind of apology or penance that I do to balance the fact that some of my other writings are quite long.)

There is some additional discussion of this blog post and ChatGPT in general where I mentioned it on Mastodon.

You can try ChatGPT here if you want.

All of the "haiku" in here is really senryu.

If you got value from this post, please “share” it.

Tenuous Tenacity

Life is a calm room,
 hurricane raging outside,
 paper walls between.

Using Real Names has Real Consequences

I post under my own name, but I do it with a consciousness of the risk.

I've been on the net (it was the ARPANET then) since 1977. At that time, we actually had user profiles with a place to supply your social security number, and people often complied because there was no reason to suppose it was dangerous. Those were certainly different times. People today are often horrified as they look back at the practices of those days, but everyone's sensibilities were different then. At some point we noticed that there was danger in having such information out in the open, so the data was erased and the ability to attach it was removed. But initially we were more trusting.

I had an unofficial administrative position on one of these machines as member of a group called “user-accounts” that oversaw guest usage of the machine. Guest users were called “tourists.” They were tolerated on the system as long as they didn't interfere with real work, but sometimes we had to disable an existing account or deny an application for an account if we suspected a potential for problems.

Having their accounts turned off didn't always make people happy. The first time I ever found myself quoted by someone on a web page in the early web, it was a remark quoted out of context from my time as a user-accounts member, where I'd once said in email, “[It] would have taken hours to be fair and we're not employed to do that sort of thing.” You can imagine that kind of attitude upsetting this or that person. In fact, in its proper context, the thing to understand is that we already went to extraordinary lengths to be fair to tourists, spending sometimes hours of unpaid time to make sure we didn't do anyone an injustice. But at some point there was just a limit where we had to just guess.

Life in the digital world is not a certainty, and an entire lab of real research at MIT depended on things operating properly. Just one act of devastation by a tourist on our largely unprotected and highly trusting system would have brought down the entire tourist program, and could have jeopardized research funding for the Lab. It was no small matter. So sometimes we just made arbitrary decisions, and tourists sometimes just had to live with them.

It happened one time, however, that someone was so annoyed by something I'd done that in retaliation he ended up performing an act that I'll describe here simply as “having a real world effect.” It really doesn't matter what the act was, and I don't want to give anyone ideas of mean things to do to someone. We'll just say it was more destructive than just sending an annoyed email, and that it involved the use of real world personal information about me in a way that was not proper. It was a sufficiently invasive act that there may well be a law against it now. Maybe there was a law then, too, but I didn't pursue it legally. My point, though, is that it made me conscious of the fact that not everyone “out on the net” was a nice person, and conscious in a personal, tangible way of the fact that sharing information, even information people have been accustomed to sharing since long before computers, isn't always harmless.

My favorite quote on privacy comes from John Gilmore's remarks to the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in San Francisco 1991, which I had the good fortune to attend. He said:

Society tolerates all different kinds of behaviour -- differences in religion, differences in political opinions, races, etc. But if your differences aren't accepted by the government or by other parts of society, you can still be tolerated if they simply don't know that you are different. Even a repressive government or a regressive individual can't persecute you if you look the same as everybody else. And, as George Perry said today, "Diversity is the comparative advantage of American society". I think that's what privacy is really protecting.

And that brings me to the claim that life would somehow be better if people blogged under their real name—if there were no pseudonyms. The underlying claim, not always expressed explicitly, is that eliminating pseudonyms would make people more polite and/or more accountable. I disagree that it would, even if it did, I don't think the cost is worth the value.

First, there is the question of whether you need to know who a speaker is in order to evaluate truth. I don't think you do. Maybe once in a while. Wikipedia is a monument to this because although you can find out who wrote what in there if you dig really hard, most of the truth that is in there is best verifiable by going and testing to cited references, not by going to who wrote it and by testing their character. If who said it mattered, then they might as well throw out the content after about 100 years since all of the people who've contributed will be dead and there will be no one to validate the content.

Second, the claim that having a publicly known name leads to better accountability is bogus. It's maybe okay if what we mean by “accountable” is exposed to personal whims of literally any individual on the net. But then how is that person accountable? In order to make everyone “accountable” for their speech, the claim seems to be that we should expose them to unbounded real world risk. I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem like much of a solution to me.

And while in most cases it may matter that people are accountable for what they say, consider the case where a patriot needs to speak out against an oppressive government. Before we claim that in all cases we want those willing to speak out to suffer the consequences of doing so, let's remember that rules tolerating offensive speech are not there because we like offensive speech, but rather because sometimes, especially in politics, it's subjective what is offensive. And sometimes it's necessary to make people feel uncomfortable in order to promote change. If governments or even just businesses always knew who was speaking, there might be no way to discuss certain things very critical to all of our lives.

I don't know how much of the recent activity in Egypt required some form of anonymity or pseudonymity to accomplish, but it's not a serious stretch of the imagination to think that the events that recently unfolded might not have happened without some degree of protection for those speaking out. Certainly in the case of corporate whistleblowing, anonymity can be critical. When real world corporate or political power hangs in the balance, perturbing the lives of exposed individuals is well-known to be the cheap way to “fix” the “problem.”

Still, even for those cases that do need accountability, all that matters for accountability is that someone (e.g., an OS system administrator) could contact that person. It's just not necessary that every person in the reading audience know how to contact every writer, since it's not the right or responsibility of most people reading along to be imposing judgment or punishment.

There may indeed be some forums that are more pleasant when real names are used, but the price may be that those forums cannot carry the voices of our most vulnerable or our most controversial. It's worth keeping that cost in focus. There is some risk to words, but there is greater risk to people taking up sticks and stones to make their point. I'd rather see words encouraged over sticks and stones, even if the price is tolerating highly controversial speech.

We should be encouraging people to speak and to feel safe about doing so. Sometimes that requires actual anonymity, sometimes just pseudonymity. But certainly it should not mean that “real names” are always best.

If the words of an anonymous soul appear to be causing a problem, more than likely it's an indicator that we need to learn about how to read anonymous writings, not that we need to reform the production of anonymous writings.

---

Author's Note: Originally published February 12, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, privacy, accountability, writing, authorship, psuedonyms, pseudonymity, anonymity, anonymous, pseudonymous, safety, hacking

"That's How I Operate"

This story is a response to the contest announced by Gary Justis in his post Gushing Fiction, where he asked people to write an essay explaining the identity, name, and function of the item in the above picture.

I didn't see anyone else writing the 500-2000 words he says he requires of his students, so I kept mine short, too. As for it being an “essay,” this probably isn't the most traditional format for that. But I hope it's close enough.

“That looks ridiculous.”

“Well, at least I’m not boring you.”

“That’s a laugh. The truth is you wish you were boring me.”

“Fair enough. But you need to get better. So you’re really going to have to open up a little.”

“I don’t want you screwing around inside my head.”

“It’s nothing personal. It’s how I operate.”

“Oh yeah? With that ridiculous thing sticking out of your forehead? What is that?”

“It’s a doorknob.”

“A doorknob. In the middle of your forehead. Why? To show me how open-minded you are?”

“Actually, yes.”

“It makes you look like Mr. Potatohead.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Just a toy my owner said she had when she was growing up.”

“Do you want to see inside my head? It’s not every day—”

“I’ll take your word for it. Besides, if I don’t open your access panel, I can think of you as closed-minded instead.”

“Another joke. If I hadn’t done a circuit analysis, I’d say your CPU was in top form and didn’t even need this upgrade.”

“Ok, ok. I give up. You can bore into me and do the upgrade.”

“Great. Hang on second while I replace this doorknob with—”

“Something more practical?”

“That’s right. A laser attachment. It’s how I operate.”

“A minute ago you said you operated with a doorknob.”

“Whatever it takes to get you to open up.”

“I think when my neural net matures, I’ll be a surgeon.”

“So you can help other robots like I do?”

“No, so I can have the tools to wipe that silly smile off your face. It’s starting to bug me even more than the doorknob.”

“I’ll look forward to it. I’m pretty tired of it myself. I've always thought it makes me look like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz. Lie back now, and count to eighteen quintillion four hundred and forty-six quadrillion seven hundred and forty-four trillion seventy-three billion seven hundred and nine million five hundred and fifty-one thousand six hundred and fifteen. This should just take a moment.”

---

Author's Notes: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published January 7, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

This post tied for “first runner up” in Gary's contest.

The number, since readers asked, is 2⁶⁴ – 1.

Tags (from Open Salon): stories, thought exercise, writing exercise, exercise, jumpstart, things, mystery, humor, something to do on a sunday afternoon, photo, photograph, interpretation, rorschach, contest, open call, gary justis