Poetry for Our AGI Times

An Enthusiastic Adversarial Collaboration with @Sl8rv

A couple weeks ago I got so fed up with so many smart people spending so much time experimenting with GPT-3 and DALL-E and so forth (when I, personally, think that there are deeper problems to be solved), that I wrote a poem.

Not a very good one, mind you, but a riff on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. It started like this:

I saw the best minds of my generation …

spending hours upon hours

having fun with DALL-E

The rest of it wasn’t very good; meter was never my strong point, and I wrote it as a joke.

Slater Victoroff, or @Sl8rv as he is known on Twitter, one of the few people in the Twitterverse who both a poetry afficionado and at CTO at an AI company, saw it. Turns out Howl is his favorite poem, and he was (rightly) appalled by my meter mangling, and snarked about it on Twitter. So I said, in somewhat nicer words, if you are so smart, do better.

And he did!

Here’s his riff on Howl, infinitely better than mine:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by GAN bliss, DALL-E faux miracles surround,

whirring themselves through GPU chips at dawn looking for intelligence,

Academic hucksters burning for the true platonic computation to build real intelligence with the machinery of night,

who privileged and funded and rosy-eyed and strong sat up building in the preternatural darkness of San Francisco hearing nothing but siren songs of infinite progress,

who built their brains like symbols or pattern matchers and saw some superintelligence reflected back in the models they built of themselves,

who passed through every industry with radiant cool eyes hallucinating ignorance and blinded stagnation among the scholars of yore,

who were extracted from the academies for giants and surrendered to the clear, inevitable scaling,

who toiled in thin client shackles, burning their money on cloud compute and selling a Future they couldn't find,

who got busted pushing biased tech when everyone who was there knew that there was no good way of fixing it,

who ran NAS on free credit or sloppy grid search on supercomputers, win, or shift your target for success time after time

with dreams, with myths, with vague promises, capital and hope and endless hype,

philosophic gaps filled with profound ego and hubris evident between distant poles of omniscience and ignorance, illuminating all the motionless world of Mind between,

Since then, we have become Twitter DM friends. (We’d never met before).

Every few days I send him another idea for poem—in the modern parlance, one might call it, dare I say, a … prompt — and Slater goes to town. Here are the next two he wrote, again with my prompt in bold, his eat-your-heart-out-GPT-3 continuation thereafter.

Prompt

Double bubble

(fine) tune and trouble

after Macbeth

Slater:

Backprop, backprop truth and error;

'puter whir and SATA buffer.

Text-to-image diffusion,

On GPU profusion;

Mean batch norm and attention,

Embeddings, cursed dimensions,

Momentum and energy,

Contrastive cross-entropy,

For models that minds do kindle,

Epochs pass and 'jectives dwindle.

Backprop, backprop truth and error;

'puter whir and SATA buffer.

Check it with precise ablations,

Then expose its limitations.

The one after that riffed on some lines written by the British songwriter Rod Temperton, for he opening of the title song of the best-selling album in history. If anyone out there can do a good Vincent Price impression, please let us know.

Darkness falls across the land

The AGI hour is close at hand

Robots crawl in search of blood

Scan for bodies in the mud

The wreckage bodies do stud

Search and rescue from a flood

Hulking metal roams the plains

My next prompt:

La la LaMDA

it ain’t got nothing to do with sentience

La la LaMDA

came back in Spanish!

Para burlar a LaMDA

Para burlar a LaMDA

Se necesita algo de perspicacia

Algo de perspicacia

De mi, de ti, arriba, y arriba

y arriba, y arriba

pruebas traeré, pruebas traeré, pruebas traeré

After La Bamba, in the original, by Richie Valens

And lastly….it’s time for none other than … Taylor … Swift!

Prompt:

i stay out too late

got nothing in my brain

i got too many nodes

but i can't make them stay

tune 'em up

modelers gonna play

the haters gonna hate

tune em up

tune em up

Slater:

I make dumb mistakes

Got nothing in my brain

That’s what people say

That’s what people say

I have got so many weights

Do things I can’t explain

At least that’s what people say

that’s what people say

I keep improvin’

Benchmarks they keep movin’

And who knows what I’m usin’

Data mined

Further questions are declined

By the layer you will pay, pay, pay, pay, pay

And the scrapers gonna scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape

Baby, I’m just gonna scale, scale, scale, scale, scale

I scale it up, I scale it up

after Shake it Up

That’s it— for now. If you give this post a like, maybe we’ll do more. If you don’t, well, no promises; we probably won’t be able to help ourselves.

– Gary Marcus, with the considerable help of Slater [@Sl8rv] Victoroff.

p.s. Feel free to drop suggestions for more below—and we can’t wait to see whether PaLM’s talents for jokes extends to PoEMs.