Stochastic Parrots. I don’t know for certain how this particular AI was trained, but this is my understanding of how AI is doing this kind of thing, in general.

If you look at some financial new web sites (Yahoo finance for one, Marketwatch for another), you’ll see that a good number of short articles are not written by humans – they’re assembled by some AI mechanism that looks for certain data (EPS, share price, quarterly profit) and then auto-pastes them into a story – untouched and unedited by humans.

So I guess it isn’t too big of a jump to have moved to fiction.

Poetry is pretty easy to do without A.I. just doing random lookup tables of inspirational quotes and stuff. That’s not too much different than training A.I. on this.

Be kind to others
let the self breathe
humanity is a gift
reap what you sow
yada yada yada

Throw it together in any order you like.

Al who?

“Incidentally, there’s a famous irony here. If you had asked anyone in the 60s or 70s, they would have said, well clearly first robots will replace humans for manual labor, and then they’ll replace humans for intellectual things like math and science, and finally they might reach the pinnacles of human creativity like art and poetry and music.

The truth has turned out to be the exact opposite. I don’t think anyone predicted that.”

Scott Aaronson

I can’t seem to train my brain to see “Artificial Intelligence”. It always sees Al, as in Al Capone.