I asked ChatGPT to come up with a parody of a Beatnik poem,
within seconds this appeared, daddy-o (daddy – AI -o!) :
Jazz snaps, bongo thumps,
man, l’m real gone
like milk, like fog,
cat’s got whiskers, but who’s got time?
Reality’s a broken jukebox,
spinnin’ static and cigarette smoke,
dig it, daddy-o — the universe yawns
A good effort. I dig it. However in the book Science Shapes Tomorrow (1962) they asked a computer
(probably the size of a house) to write a Beatnik poem, having fed it 500 words
usually used by Beatnik poets’ and it came up with this:
Auto beatnik poem number 41: insects.
All children are small and crusty.
And I can saw all dragons.
And all pale, blind, humble Waters are cleaning,
And flying woefully is like closing sweetly,\
A insect, dumb and torpid, comes off the daddyo,
How is a insect into this fur?
The 2024 is probably better as a parody, AI by its mimetic nature being adept at parody – but the one from 62 years ago is a fine effort.
At that time what has now become Artificial Intelligence was called ‘Machine Thinking.’ In the book they say that a thinking machine must be able to learn by experience, to be flexible in the way it takes in its information. The machine ‘will have to come far closer to our almost miraculous five senses which feed our brains with information. Great steps are being made in this direction… The third ability is the machine must be able to break free from logic, produce for themselves new and original ways of working with the data inside them.’ The fourth is interesting – the machine must be able to recognise when it is being brilliant – ‘it would be sad if a machine hit by chance, for example, on a successor to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and then did not recognize that this was a more valuable statement than printing out that the Earth is round.’ This is quite a demand – even now, surely, it is the human who recognizes when the machine is being brilliant. This could change..
