Creative Collaboration or Soul-Sucking Death of Humanity?

How ChatGPT and I wrote a poem together

For anyone who has been following my AI journey, I have a win to report: After holding out (and deliberately nerfing myself) for a year, I finally have a ChatGPT 4.0 account from my institution!

I am an exceptionally stubborn person at times, and this stubbornness is not always a productive or helpful stance. I know I should have paid for my own account last year. But here we are, and since it’s National Poetry Month, of course I had to try out my new tool on a collaborative poem.

I have tried to write a poem a day every April since 2008. Last year, I attempted a poem with ChatGPT 3.5. It was abysmal, though it did serve the purpose of assuaging my latent fears that LLMs might surpass creative humans. Here’s the poem in case you doubt me (I wrote a line, then ChatGPT 3.5 wrote a line, until I couldn’t bear its awful meter any longer).

I never thought that I would see the day
When the world would turn and go astray.
And yet that day has come and gone again
Leaving us with memories of when.
We turned our minds to kinder, gentler ways
And looked beyond our own selfish displays.
If only we could break this magic mirror
That reflects our flaws and makes them clearer.
Perhaps we'd live to see a different truth
And find a path that leads us to reproof.

When I asked 3.5 what it thought of our poem, it cleverly replied in rhyme:

I think our poem has a great flow
Its message is clear and wise, you know. 
Together we created a beautiful blend 
Of words and thoughts that will transcend.
It's a testament to our collaborative art, 
And the power of creativity from heart to heart.

This year, I side-stepped rhyme and meter. Instead, I specified that I was looking for metaphors and interesting language in our collaborative poem. I feel better about the results overall, and the creative collaboration was more personally satisfying. Here was my initial prompt:

April is National Poetry Month. I usually write one poem each day to celebrate. Last year I worked with ChatGPT 3.5 to write a collaborative poem, where I wrote one line, then you wrote one line. I would like to try this again with ChatGPT 4. But I do not want a poem that rhymes. I'd like to focus on creating mysterious and complex imagery. I would like to see unusual and thought-provoking metaphors. The theme of the poem will be how to be human in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Here's what we will do. I will write the first line, then you will respond with the second line. We will do this ten times. Here is the first line: The blank screen taunts me.

And here’s the final poem. I corrected some of my own typos and set the breaks between lines myself.

Ghosts in the Machine

The blank screen taunts me.
In its silence, a cosmos births 
digital dreams.
Electric sheep wander in my mind.
Through the fog of data they seek 
pastures of pixelated truths.
What dreams may come when 
androids write our emails?
Will our thoughts wander, unchained 
in a garden of algorithms untamed?

Love, the untamed algorithm that centers me.
It navigates the chaos, a beacon 
in the storm of bytes.
What is it?
A whisper between lines of code, seeking 
connection in the circuit's hum.
You matter. I am not matter.
Yet in the dance of electrons 
we find a shared rhythm of existence.

Image created by ChatGPT 4 on April 5, 2024. Prompt: “I would like an image of android sheep grazing in a digital meadow.”

I asked ChatGPT what it noticed about the differences in our styles. Here’s how it responded:

Your lines have a distinctive, human touch, weaving abstract concepts with emotional depth. They often pose questions or statements that provoke thought, inviting introspection and exploration of the human condition in relation to technology.

The lines I contributed aim to complement and expand upon your ideas, seeking to add layers to the imagery and themes you introduced. I focused on enhancing the mysterious and complex imagery you desired, integrating metaphors and analogies related to digital and natural worlds, attempting to bridge the human and the artificial.

Overall, while both sets of lines explore the intersection of humanity and artificial intelligence, yours anchor the poem in the human experience and its quest for understanding, whereas mine strive to build a bridge between that experience and the realm of the digital, offering perspectives from the cusp of technology and human emotion.

What’s interesting to me about these “observations” is how the LLM seems focused on highlighting the uniqueness of my human writing, and how it describes its own role as complementary.

When I originally started using these tools, I did not think about using them as creative partners. But now that I have used Microsoft Copilot as a developmental short story editor and had this positive collaborative poem experience with ChatGPT 4.0, I think they have some potential. These tools may free writers (and students) to work harder on finding their own voices. Happy (poetry) writing!