I spent months trying to make an AI write like a poet, but the real trick was simpler

For about six months, I was feeding a language model all these complex prompts about meter and metaphor, trying to get it to make real poetry. The results were always stiff. Then, a friend in Seattle just said, 'Have you tried asking it to write a bad poem first?' I did, and the silly, messy output it gave had more honest feeling than anything I'd gotten before. It made me see I was focusing on the wrong goal entirely. Has anyone else found that asking for the 'wrong' thing from an AI actually got you closer to what you wanted?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthony8831mo ago

Totally makes sense. You were asking for a perfect robot poem, which is a dead end. The AI needs room to mess up and be human. That's where the real feeling comes from.

barnes.jamie1mo ago

Feeling from a glitch sounds pretentious.