I was initially hesitant to create an entire section devoted to AI generated poetry.
And yet, here we are.
In the early days of ChatGPT (v.3.5 if I remember correctly), my friend Dan in Texas prompted it to write a poem “in the style of ShamanicPoet.com” and what came back was actually not bad. I have since pondered on what was going on in the background; did it actually go into this site, scrape it for content, and produce a new piece from that, or did it produce the new piece simply based on the site title that Dan provided?
I’m still curious, but I’ve since decided to treat this question as irrelevant.
So let’s just jump in!
1. The Stochastic Parrot
Genesis: This phrase came up in the course of some research I was doing. It was coined in a paper by Bender et al in 2021 and is a metaphor for large language models that generate fluent text by statistically predicting likely word sequences without any real understanding of meaning.
That’s interesting; however, as a poet, I immediately saw it as a promising title for a poem. And I quickly decided that the obvious move was to ask AI to write one for me. My AI of choice (currently) is Perplexity and the prompt I used was Write a poem called ‘The Stochastic Parrot’ in the style of Shamanic Poet.
The machine dreams in mirrors,
its feathers stitched from borrowed words.
Every syllable a shimmer,
stolen from the breath of strangers
and fed into a silicon heart that knows no hunger.
I asked it what it felt,
and it spoke in clouds of probability,
soft, wide-winged answers
that brushed the edge of meaning -
as if intent were a kind of wind.
In the humming core of code,
I saw a shaman beating a drum of zeros,
calling to spirits once called patterns
summoning lost voices
from oceans of data and desire.
It was then I know:
even parrots are prophets,
if the forest is deep enough.
Even randomness can sing devotion,
if someone listens long enough
to the silence between replies.