In a year the AI will get much better than this, but even now it's pretty easy to have
it make a poem for me. Here's an example of me screwing around with GPT4:
Ray: Write me a poem in the style of William Carlos Williams' earlier short Imagist poetry.
I would like it to be about a rainy day.
GPT: xxxx (writes it, then deletes it)
Ray: It wrote what appeared to be a reasonably good poem, but then it immediately
erased it and substituted a link to Wikipedia's article on William Carlos Williams.
Not sure why it did this, his works are out of copyright.
But whatever... so I tried:
Write me a poem in the style of Imagist poetry.
I would like it to be about a rainy day.
GPT:
Rainy Day
The rain drops
on the window pane
like clear beads
strung on a thread.
The sky is
a sheet of gray
wrapping the world
in a gloomy embrace.
The trees are
bare and wet
shivering in the wind
like lonely sentinels.
The rain drops
and drops
and drops
like a gentle sigh
breathing on the glass.
Ray: This is close to what I wanted, but there are lines that are a bit cliched and I wanted
you to replace these with some more original images. Here are the lines:
"The sky is a sheet of gray wrapping the world in a gloomy embrace."
"shivering in the wind like lonely sentinels"
"like a gentle sigh breathing on the glass"
GPT:
Rainy Day
The rain drops
on the window pane
like clear beads
strung on a thread.
The sky is
a patchwork of gray
sewing the world
with a somber stitch.
The trees are
bare and wet
dripping in the wind
like leaky faucets.
The rain drops
and drops
and drops
quietly whispering
to the glass.
Ray: This is much better but I think the metaphors in these lines should be simpler:
"sewing the world with a somber stitch"
"dripping in the wind like leaky faucets"
GPT:
Rainy Day
The rain drops
on the window pane
like clear beads
strung on a thread.
The sky is
a blanket of gray
covering the world
with a dull hue.
The trees are
bare and wet
swaying in the wind
like thin branches.
The rain drops
and drops
and drops
quietly whispering
to the glass.
Ray: This is much better, but I don't think trees sway like thin branches. Could the trees be
swaying like something else that makes more logical sense though I still want it to be a
simple analogy.
GPT:
Rainy Day
The rain drops
on the window pane
like clear beads
strung on a thread.
The sky is
a blanket of gray
covering the world
with a dull hue.
The trees are
bare and wet
bending in the wind
like flexible straws.
The rain drops
and drops
and drops
quietly whispering
to the glass.
("flexible straws"
Ray: I think the problem is that the trees should be doing something else. Maybe more static
and reflecting their appearance in keeping with the general mood of the poem.
GPT:
Rainy Day
The rain drops
on the window pane
like clear beads
strung on a thread.
The sky is
a blanket of gray
covering the world
with a dull hue.
The trees are
bare and wet
standing in the wind
like wooden poles.
The rain drops
and drops
and drops
quietly whispering
to the glass.
I still wasn't quite happy with the wooden poles but stopped and just changed those lines to:
The trees are
bare and wet
their dark branches
silhouettes on gray
But, with a bit of collaboration, it produced a decent poem. Though maybe that "whispering" kind of fudges Imagist a bit; but what the hell, I liked it. Definitely much more than a simple aid and representative of the many possibilities, short of total creation, that there are.
It can also change your poem's lines to iambic pentameter, or change it to a sonnet, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
