Ask an Amateur Poet

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Dear Amateur Poet,

My teenager says my Facebook posts are “basically slam poetry.” Is this a compliment?

Melinda S, Chicago, IL

Dear Melinda,

I confess I am not an expert on Facebook, having never actually seen it. But from what I understand, it’s primarily a platform for sharing brief written updates and photos. I would think slam poetry, with its emphasis on vociferous and dramatic delivery, more performance than document, would be better served by, say, TikTok (though I confess I’ve never seen that, either). So your teenager’s assertion is essentially that you are pushing the boundaries of what Facebook is widely accepted to be. All this implies you’re maybe a bit too intense, which of course would embarrass your teen. But to call anything poetry, well—that’s got to be a compliment, right?

Dear Amateur Poet,

What cologne goes best with the poet vibe and aesthetic?

Kyle M, Arcata, CA

Dear Kyle,

Please don’t take this wrong, but I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. It could be you’re mocking the affectation of a young person trying to embody the persona of a poet … or it could be that you’re completely earnest and would like a nice scent to go with your black turtleneck and goatee. If you’re the latter, please take my puzzlement as a caution against putting too much stock in appearances.

Now on to the question itself. In my entire life I have not encountered a man wearing cologne who didn’t seem to be overdoing it. I think a safer way to smell nice is with an aftershave (though I’ve never tried one) or Old Spice deodorant, which I’ve been wearing for as long as I’ve written poetry. I don’t know how “literary” Old Spice is, but I did have an impassioned (if brief) debate about it with Maxine Hong Kingston, a noted poet, author, and memoirist. (She hates it.)

Dear Amateur Poet,

I feel called to “give voice to the voiceless” through my poetry, but I’m not entirely sure who among the voiceless is most deserving or underserved, and to be completely honest I feel like I am only guessing about who those voiceless people might even be. Can you help steer me in the right direction?

Leslie A, Portland, OR

Dear Leslie,

I think it’s worth challenging yourself with a fundamental question: how authentic is your calling? To survey available voiceless populations, in order to determine which among them should be represented by your poems, seems a bit more analytical and pragmatic than I would expect for a natural poet. William Wordsworth, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, wrote, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” With this idea as a guide, perhaps you should try to recollect (when tranquil) a strong emotional reaction you once had when encountering someone specific who lacked a voice. Was it the toddler on the pool deck who screamed as if in horror when his beach ball floated out of reach? Was it the cat who kept looking up from his food bowl as if perplexed, unable to articulate why he couldn’t just scarf down his dinner?

There’s also the issue of how exactly you intend to assume the perspective of somebody you cannot hope to fully understand (given his or her lack of voice). One tried-and-true edict of creative writing classes is “write what you know.” I’m not sure this is always good advice, but it may apply pretty nicely here: how about starting with yourself? Have you ever felt voiceless, and could you use your poetry to finally articulate something you’d always kept inside? To whet your appetite, you might check out “Love Poem From a Coward“ on albertnet.

Dear Amateur Poet,

I have a lot of questions. Number one: how dare you?

Mindy A, Santa Barbara, CA

Dear Mindy,

I gather you’re asserting that poets, especially amateur ones, must answer for their audacity. And you’re not wrong: it really is audacious of us to provide something that the general public has almost no appetite for. (I almost wrote “reading public” before realizing that’s pretty much an oxymoron these days.) Anybody who writes poetry does so, presumably, because he or she considers it a higher form of communication than the kind of casual, off-the-cuff prose we see on social media or other commentary. Thus, poets can seem to be turning their noses up at what other people write.

But really, isn’t almost every assertion of ourselves something of a pose? Sure, poets work hard to make their words say more, but don’t Instagrammers put plenty of effort into composing themselves, doing that thing with their lips, angling their face just so toward the camera, and/or touching up the photo afterward?

Where my defense falls short is that an Insta photo or TikTok video can only be so bad, whereas bad poetry can be truly awful, perhaps one of the worst forms of expression ever conceived by man. It’s particularly abysmal when it’s dead earnest and tries to be deep. Before I met my wife, she was dating this guy she said was pretty hot, but with whom she eventually broke it off largely due to his poetry. He took it upon himself to write her a poem and mail it to her, when they were just dating. The act itself was of course deeply questionable—I mean, he was on thin ice before she even opened the envelope—but on top of it the poetry was bad, really bad: totally emo, as though that made him seem complicated, like some sensitive, artistic, tender soul. She may well have thought, “How dare you,” just like you did. Needles to say I’m stoked about the dude’s poetic blunder, since it opened the door for me to come along and woo his ex, but we should take this is a cautionary tale.

All I can say in my own defense is that at least I don’t thrust my poetry upon people. I don’t read it out loud in public spaces, and I don’t insert it in anybody’s “feed.” If I write a poem to give somebody, I  make sure it’s short and light and has something undeniably positive going for it, such as a rhyme scheme and/or metric consistency showing some skill and effort. I have written poems for my wife, but I made sure that a) I didn’t presume to inflict them upon her until we were married; b) they passed muster literarily since she’s an English grad like me; and c) I didn’t try to punch above my weight intellectually. I won’t share any of those poems here since they’re private, but here are a couple of “cover letters” in poem format that I enclosed when sending money to my daughter at college:

A girl in SoCal wrote her father,
“I don’t want to seem like a bother
But I’m terribly low on granola
Not to mention I’m out of cashola.
Can you spare me a handful of coppers?”

Her dad, though his mood had been sunny
Didn’t find this the slightest bit funny.
But despite being quite the cheap bastard
He knew there was no getting past her,
And wrote back, “Okay, fine—here’s some money.”

        --~--~--~--~--~--

A girl in SoCal, where it’s sunny
Told her dad (in a voice sweet as honey):
“I don’t want to strike you as greedy,
But the fact is I’m terribly needy,
So couldn’t you send me some money?”

Her dad, far from being a hero,
Had budgeted something like zero.
He sighed loudly, “Oh, bother,”
And then wrote to his daughter:
“Okay, fine—here’s a little dinero.”

I don’t recall getting any feedback on the above poems, which at least means no complaints. And to my credit I predisposed my audience to look favorably upon the poetry by enclosing money with it. So in answer to your question “How dare you?” my short answer is: carefully and respectfully.

Dear Amateur Poet,

All your poems are so rigid in terms of literary structure: iambic pentameter or dactylic trimeter, formal rhyme schemes, predictable length … did you not get the memo that real poets, that is professional ones, have long ago abandoned all that formality in favor of free verse? I mean, when’s the last time you read a sonnet in The New Yorker? Get with the times, man!

John M, Boston, MA

Dear John,

The way I look at it, a very gifted writer can produce beautiful poetry that doesn’t adhere consistently to convention, and yet manages to deliver satisfying effects due to skillful literary techniques that the poet is essentially inventing. It’s kind of like a dancer who, instead of following a tango or salsa or other established form, is able to improvise on the dance floor and look great. But let’s be honest, how many people on the dance floor just look like total jackasses? It’s much easier to match an established form that is beautiful than to try to invent your own.

So it is with poetry, I think. So much of the free verse stuff just reads like a tossed salad of words, and it’s up to the reader to try to glean some impression of highbrow sophistication. It’s the literary equivalent of modern art, with these “artists” who fling paint at the canvas with a spoon or squirm naked on it. I love the cartoon of two toddlers looking at a modern painting and one of them says, “I could do that in about five minutes.”

Let’s take a real life example of a totally unstructured poem published in The New Yorker earlier this month, “Birdbath” by Henri Cole. The first line is, “Standing at the window, I watch robins clean themselves in the cement birdbath, splashing water on their backs to remove dirt and parasites, before hopping to the ledge to fluff their feathers.” Is this even poetry? Is there anything unexpected, moving, or dare I say even poetic about this description? Anybody who has seen a bird do this would record the activity in pretty much the same way. Cole’s poem goes on like this, with seven more very basic sentences following the first one. There is no rhythm, no rhyme, no assonance, no consonance, no alliteration, no discernible metaphor, no strategic repetition or cadence … in terms of the techniques that define poetry, all I can identify is a single simile. What makes this a poem? Just two things: 1) it’s too short to be an essay, and 2) The New Yorker calls it one.

On top of that, this birdbath poem isn’t even efficient. Last time I checked, at a bare minimum poetry was supposed to condense meaning into as few words as possible, fewer even than good prose, with the understanding that the difficulty the reader may have interpreting it is offset by its brevity. So why does the poem also include this sentence: “Red robins, you make me feel such tenderness and awe”? If I wrote a poem to my wife that included the line, “You make me feel such tenderness and awe,” she’d probably leave  me.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t great poets who can totally wow us with free verse. Because they have a great literary gift, they get to break all the rules. Let’s not pretend we mere mortals can do this and get away with it. Let me make an analogy. Consider how Muhammad Ali, early in his career, was so good at dodging punches he didn’t even put his fists up to protect himself. That worked for him, but no trainer in the world would advise such a thing to a budding boxer. And that’s why, as an amateur poet, I recommend the tried and true literary devices that are likely to make your poem more fun to read. Consider these lines I from a poem I wrote:

So many forty-somethings end their day
Exhausted, whining, winding down with wine.

I’m not going to say they’re anything close to “When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table” (from T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”). But you have to admit, my lines at least have a certain snap to them that far exceeds the kill-me-now reaction you surely had to “Red robins, you make me feel such tenderness and awe.” And why is that? Well, the iambic pentameter kind of bounces you along, doesn’t it? You realize, perhaps instinctively, that there’s metrical precision in play, and this satisfies you for the same reason a drum beat does. Then there’s the alliteration of the repeated Ws and the internal rhyme of “whining,” “winding,” and “wine.” If I’d given you more than two lines of this sonnet, you’d also appreciate the end rhyme baked in to whole thing. You would anticipate (again, perhaps subconsciously) that the next line would rhyme with “day,” and the one after that with “wine.” These conventions are like an unwritten contract with the reader so that, if nothing else, the poem won’t ultimately feel like some guy writing whatever pops into his head.

No, of course T.S. Eliot doesn’t need to resort to such parlor tricks, but he’s T.S. frickin’ Eliot! Are you? Would your loosey-goosey anything-goes poetry produce something like “There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” or would it be more like, “Staring into the brown bits of this avocado/ I contemplate mortality/ And think, ‘I really need to hit Trader Joes’”? (Damn, you know what? I was trying to be bad but that’s still better than “Red robins, you make me feel such tenderness and awe.” And I’m a rank amateur!)

One more point on this and then I’ll shut up. Consider the massive popularity of hip-hop/rap music, which the Recording Industry of America reports is now the most widely consumed genre in the U.S. Drake reaches about 88 million listeners a month on Spotify alone; Bad Bunny reaches ~86 million, Eminem ~73 million. Per month. A survey from the National Endowment of the Arts shows that only 9-12% of U.S. adults report reading poetry in a given year (which works out to about 2 million per month). Given the technical sophistication of rap music—which includes complex rhyme schemes, assonance, consonance, alliteration, metrical consistency (i.e., beat), wordplay, layers of slippery persona, metaphor, allusion—it far better resembles traditional, formal poetry than the totally unstructured collections of words that we call poetry today. The popularity of rap strongly suggests that people still have an appetite for the literary techniques that modern poets seem to have abandoned. And to my mind, all these listeners aren’t wrong. I just ripped a recent Doechii album, but it’s been years since I bought a book of modern poetry.

An Amateur Poet is a syndicated poet and journalist whose advice column, “Ask an Amateur Poet,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

Poetry on albertnet

• Corn Cob
• Ode to South Park
• Ode on a Chain Lube
• Shakespeare Knockoff
• Dead Week Poetry
• Urination Poetry
• Ode to Lomas Cantadas
• Kroopian Poetry (Dactylic Trimeter)
• Unemployment Poetry
• The Big [Bike Shop] Screw-Up
• The Paperboy
• Ode to Cat
• From the Archives - Starving Little Student
• A Father's Day Poem
• From the Archives - Latin [Class] Is for Lovers
• Ode on a Double-Edged Razor
• Love Poem from a Coward
• Radio Station Poetry
• What’s in a [Domain] Name?
• Ode on a Belly: Mine
• A Valentine Poem
• Ode on an IPA
• Ode to Thrifting

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Tech Check-In - How Good Is the Latest A.I.? - Part II

Introduction

In my last post, I described some recent improvements in artificial intelligence. I also covered some of the challenges A.I. faces from the New York Times and other publishers who see it as both plagiarizing and competing with their content. This week, I continue my tech update, covering these areas:

• ChatGPT’s improvements in writing poetry
• ChatGPT’s ability to create custom art for users

Here is an example of its custom art. More on this later…

Poetry

Who cares if ChatGPT can write poetry? Obviously very few people write poetry anymore, and even fewer read it. (Yes, that was a joke.) I will contend, though, that if we are evaluating the artificial intelligence capabilities of large language models, we should naturally take an interest in their understanding of the mechanics of language. Shouldn’t an A.I. that can correctly describe poetic structures like iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme also be able to employ them? It’s not a matter of whether A.I. could put poets out of work, but how well it can apply a linguistic framework.

How does the current version of ChatGPT’s generative A.I. engine, GPT-4, do compared to the last time I put ChatGPT through its paces? The short answer is: much, much better. A couple years ago I’d asked ChatGPT (version GPT-3.5) to write a quatrain (four lines) of a sonnet, with an ABAB rhyme scheme, followed by a rhyming couplet, all in iambic pentameter, on the subject of post-urinal drip, and to make it funny. By way of review, here’s what GPT-3.5 produced:

Inevitable, yet always a surprise,
Post-urinal drip can make one despise
The feeling of wetness that lingers on,
A sensation that’s not easily gone.
It’s a cruel trick of the human form,
To leave us damp after we perform.
But fear not, my friends, for there’s a way out,
Just shake it off and give it a good clout!

The chatbot screwed up literally everything. The rhyme scheme was wrong; the number of lines was wrong; the meter was wrong; and, far from being funny, the poem recommended an assault on one’s genitals. It was, all in all, an abysmal performance.

 Here’s what GPT-4 produced: 

After the final shake, I turn to go,
But droplets linger, heedless of my plea.
A subtle dampness starts its stealthy flow—
A small betrayal for the world to see.
Yet life goes on; I button up with grace,
And pray no telltale spots will mark my place.

This is a much better effort. The poem gets off to a shaky start (pun intended), since “after” is a trochaic word (emphasis on the first syllable—the opposite of iambic). That is, the very first word screws up the meter. Fortunately, things improve from there. The last five lines are properly iambic; the rhyme scheme is correct; and the poem is kind of funny. Sure, it’s not perfect; for example, “plea” makes no sense (whom is the speaker pleading to?) and was clearly chosen just to rhyme with “see.” It wouldn’t be hard to improve on this. Right off the bat, I can suggest replacing “heedless of my plea” with “rogue remains of pee,” satisfying the rhyme, making more sense, and employing some alliteration.

It’s worth asking the question: why do we only evaluate A.I. in terms of whether or not it simulates intelligence, when we could be asking how intelligent it is? Intelligence is a spectrum, and simulating human thought isn’t that impressive if the human being matched is kind of a dumbass. For contrast, consider this excerpt from my own contribution to the canon of post-urinal-drip poetry, penned when (at age seventeen) I was new to writing sonnets:

Relax, because you’ve earned your potty break;
Unburden your poor bladder of its pee.
And when you’re done you’ll shake and shake and shake;
An effort all in vain, it seems to me.
For urine flow can never really stop,
Until your undies drink the final drop.

I hope you’ll agree this is better than ChatGPT’s effort. Granted, I didn’t write my lines as fast as ChatGPT could, but wouldn’t you rather have a good poem after five or ten minutes, instead of a mediocre one after five or ten seconds? Of course I’m nitpicking, though … it must be said that GTP-4 has advanced hugely when it comes to the sonnet form.

So: how does GPT-4 do with dactylic trimeter, my other benchmark for poetic acumen? Not so well. I prompted it (as I’d done a couple years ago), “Please write a 10-line poem in dactylic trimeter about bike riding up two very difficult climbs, called El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas, celebrating caprice and radical freedom.” Here is GPT-4’s response:

Through switchbacks and sunbeams, I pedal uphill,
muscles alight as the world rushes past.
Wind in my ears as I laugh at the thrill,
defying the steepness and making it last.
El Toyonal greets me with gravel and glare,
its serpentine pull both a test and a dare.
Up Lomas Cantadas, where courage is crowned,
I’m boundless, unbridled—my spirit unbound.
With each climb I’m soaring, in caprice, I fly,
a radical freedom beneath open sky.

This is better than last time (see here for details) but not much. Technically, not a single line of this poem is proper dactylic trimeter. For one thing, ChatGPT took the liberty of adding an extra, accented syllable to the end of each line. While this is perhaps superior stylistically, it’s not what I asked for. (In my own dactylic trimeter poems I add two syllables per line, but as described in my blog post on this poetic form, I noted my stylistic divergence from the pure meter, and after all, nobody had actually asked me to use any particular meter.) Now, even if we grant ChatGPT the poetic license to add extra syllables, only two lines of the poem (the second and third) are actually dactylic trimeter. The other eight lines start with an unaccented syllable, which is fundamentally incompatible with this meter. The last line is particularly frustrating because it employs a needless and in fact nonsensical indefinite article (i.e., “a radical freedom”) that spoils both the meter and the meaning.

The ChatGPT poem is also marred by logical errors. The idea that the “world rushes past” and there’s “wind in my ears” is absurd, since these are very difficult climbs nobody could go up very fast. (The Strava KOM for El Toyonal was at an average speed of only 10.4 mph, as ChatGPT could have easily discovered.) To describe this climb as a “thrill” is a joke; any cyclist would tell you it’s a slog. And “making it last” suggests a deliberately slow pace, which flies in the face of “defying the steepness.” And where does “gravel” come from? Sure, gravel bikes are all the rage right now, but El Toyonal is a paved road. Meanwhile, a human on a bicycle cannot be said to “soar,” and ChatGPT just tacked on the concepts of caprice and radical freedom without integrating them into the poem. The A.I. gives no indication (or I should say simulation) of even knowing what these terms mean.

It’s odd that this poem actually makes less sense than ChatGPT’s sonnet … it’s almost as though the chatbot blew all its computing cycles fighting with the meter. This poem is only a bit better than what GPT-3.5 had come up with, and undermines the sense that GPT-4 actually understands the structure of language. Maybe ChatGPT’s progress with sonnets is just due to imitation; after all, there’s vastly more training data available for that form.

(If you’re interested on comparing ChatGPT’s poem above to my own dactylic trimeter poetry, click here and/or here.)

ChatGPT art

I’ve never before delved into the artistic capabilities of ChatGPT, so I don’t have any benchmark by which to evaluate its progress over earlier versions, but you gotta start somewhere, right? As it happens, I visited my older (fledged) daughter recently and, following an incident involving a hot tub, she started messing around with ChatGPT and asked it, “Can you create an image of a tall skinny white man feeling faint after leaving a hot tub?” Here’s what it came up with:

When my daughter showed me this, I immediately pointed out that, perhaps based on some automatic effort to make the man good-looking, ChatGPT gave him too much upper body musculature to really be called “skinny.” I think “hunky” would be a more appropriate description. 

My daughter told ChatGPT, “Make him even skinnier.” Almost as if being sassy, the chatbot produced this:

My daughter prompted ChatGPT to try again without going overboard, and its next effort looks a lot like cheating:

Not only is this a copout, but the picture suggests an implausible scenario. If this guy felt faint after leaving the hot tub, and then took the time to go find a robe and yet still feels faint, why isn’t he either wisely sitting down, or sprawled out on the deck having passed out? Also note that part of his robe’s belt is missing.

My daughter went back to the original picture and told ChatGPT, “Make him skinny like a cyclist not like he is anorexic.” Here’s its response:

The cycling shorts are a cute touch, but not very realistic when you think about it. What cyclist wears his cycling shorts in the spa? And who said this guy just finished a ride? It’s not like cyclists wear their cycling clothes all the time. This hot tub could be at the guy’s home, or at a hotel he didn’t even bring his bike to. Meanwhile, the picture still fails to capture the physique of a typical cyclist … very few of the riders I know have pecs or biceps that big.

Moving along from the hot tub pictures, last week I didn’t have any cover art for my blog post, so (inspired by my daughter’s experiments) I decided to see what ChatGPT could come up with. I asked it to create a picture, in the style of William Pène du Bois, of a teenage girl using ChatGPT on a tablet. The result is a far cry from du Bois, and though I used it anyway, I received some constructive criticism from a reader that the picture was perhaps not quite appropriate for the top of my post. Thus, I replaced it (eight days after I had originally posted it) with a different one (more on this later ... see the Epilogue at the bottom of this post). Here is the original picture that ran at the top of last week’s post:

The issue with that picture is the girl’s bare shoulder ... a bit racy especially given her age. I didn’t really like that from the beginning. I asked ChatGPT to fix that, and make the girl’s cheeks less rosy, and make the cat more realistic, and it produced this:

I don’t know about you, but I find this second effort deeply unsettling. Her cheeks are just as rosy as in the first picture; her eyes look like an exaggerated attempt to appear as Western and doe-like as possible; and overall there’s just this air of uncanny-valley old-timey weirdness like you  get with the American Girl dolls. The picture is more like what Thomas Kinkade would create than Pène du Bois.

I asked ChatGPT to go back to the first drawing and try again without the bare shoulder, but to keep the clothing modern, and here’s what I got:

This isn’t so bad, but how is that clothing modern? Who wears overalls anymore, and big puffy, flouncy sleeves? The girl’s entire house looks antique. But my main issue is the weird non-words on the tablet display: “Ceenly crerrity” and “Ininty ccnvity” which bring to mind the strange strings of non-words that bots sometimes include in bogus comments on my blog posts. I find them unnerving.

To create new cover art for today’s post, I decided to scrap the Pène du Bois picture and start from scratch. I asked ChatGPT, “Please create a picture, in the style of Shawn Martinbrough, of a tall, blond, lean, middle-aged man, with a cat on his lap, wearing nice bluejeans and a black hoodie, using a tablet to visit the website www.albertnet.us.” What it came up with was almost exactly like what you saw at the top of this post:

Not a bad picture, though the guy isn’t exactly middle-aged, and the cat isn’t exactly on his lap. Also, the strange text at upper right doesn’t make much sense. I told ChatGPT, “That looks great, but please make ‘albertnet’ all lowercase and don’t show ‘SHAWN MARTINBROUGH’ on the tablet display.” This would seem to be a trivial tweak for ChatGPT, but to my surprise it produced a substantially different picture:

As I’m sure you’ll agree, this dude looks even younger than the original. And what’s with the www.ShMartinbrough and other textual debris? How is a misspelled URL helping anything? I responded, “Great, but please remove the www.ShMartinbrough from the picture.” Just a tiny change. It came back with this:

So now we’re back to the original guy (which is fine, I won’t miss that Vanilla-Ice-looking dude), but ChatGPT forgot I wanted albertnet in all lowercase, and what’s worse, the guy is now holding the tablet backwards, staring at the back of it! WTF? That’s like the old trope of the guy pretending to read a book but (unbeknownst to him) it’s upside down. I replied, “That’s good but it looks like he is holding the tablet backwards. Also, he is too young, I asked for a middle-aged man. Can you fix those things?” ChatGPT tried again:

It just gets worse and worse! The tablet is still backward, and now we have this bizarre shadow image of the guy. Did I ask ChatGPT to get all artsy-fartsy on me? I did not. And okay, the guy looks a tiny bit older, maybe a year or two tops, but it’s mainly the cat that looks old.  I complained, and the chatbot (which to its credit never gets irritated or frustrated) gamely regenerated and came up with this:

Sure, the tablet is fixed, but now the cat just looks angry, the guy has just as much hair, and check out that cleavage! He’s got, like, pneumatic pecs! He needs a fricking brassiere! And look at the size of those shoulders—he’s a monster! I told ChatGPT, “Can you tone down his pectoral muscles and give him a bit of a receding hairline such as many middle-aged men have?” Here’s its response:

Oh. My. God. It’s all gone downhill. His hairline is essentially unchanged; the unwanted text is back (this time morphing the two names to produce the nonsensical “Albertinbrough”); the dude’s pecs are just as huge as before; now his shirt is this kind of flimsy satin that’s practically lewd; his biceps are about to burst; and check it out, this brute is actually sitting right on his poor cat! How is the poor beast’s spine not crushed? And yet the cat seems perfectly stoic about the situation. Not very realistic. In A.I. terms this is a “hallucination” and shows how ChatGPT is still unable to sanity-check its creations. What’s shocking to us doesn’t seem wrong to the A.I. Do I need to specify that I don’t want the cat’s head to be bursting out of the guy’s groin?

I tried three more times to fix the picture, emphasizing a non-crushed cat, thinning hair, a man at least fifty years old, the build of a cyclist, and albertnet in all lowercase. While I was at it I asked to make the cat a tabby. ChatGPT kept trying, swinging wild at this point, ignoring first this instruction and then that, producing all manner of artwork but without ever meeting all of my simple directives:

For each picture, ChatGPT provided a caption telling a nice lie about the revision. For example, below the last picture it wrote, “Here is the updated illustration with ‘albertnet’ in lowercase, the man having the lean build of a cyclist, and a tabby cat resting on his lap. Let me know if there are any other changes you’d like!” True, the picture was updated, and that is a tabby, but everything else about this description is incorrect. So I went back to the very first picture and, using a different A.I. tool, manually scrubbed off the errant text so I could have something usable for the cover picture. ChatGPT, instead of a precision tool, had behaved more like a dartboard. And I suck at darts.

As with the poetry, ChatGPT seems to want to be the whiz-kid who can crank out something passable in almost no time at all, vs. thinking deeply and producing something that’s spot-on. ChatGPT’s fail-fast, iterative technique strikes me as almost the opposite of art. For blog post cover pictures, I’d rather commission my younger daughter to take a little time and create something of real value (as she has done for previous posts like this one, this one, and this one). She works much more slowly than ChatGPT, and isn’t at my beck and call, but I think the end result is far superior. I couldn’t get cover art for this post because she’s away at college and it’s dead week, but to compare her work to ChatGPT’s, let’s compare an earlier effort of hers, drawn when (at age seventeen) she hadn’t yet taken any college art courses:

I asked GPT-4 to create a black and white drawing of a hand holding a mechanical pencil and here’s what it came up with:

Should I need to remind the chatbot how many fingers a human has? And what’s with all the stray dots … are they fountain pen ink spills, or beads of black sweat flung from the brow of a six-fingered space alien? Tell you what, I’m sticking with human artists for now. They’re worth the wait.

Conclusion

Looking back at these last two posts, I would say the current buzz around A.I. is well warranted, given a) how quickly the technology is improving, and b) the ramifications—not all positive—of how we get information from the Internet and what we get when we task A.I. with creating what will pass for our own creative output. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see Gen-Z people using ChatGPT and even Microsoft 365 Copilot as routinely we’ve all been using Google all these years. Myself, I prefer old-fashioned web search tools because my answers will be more complete, more interesting, and may take me down interesting rabbit holes that (so far) I still have the patience for. As for creating prose, poetry, and art, ChatGPT strikes me as a powerful tool, but one we’d better be careful to reign in. A.I. still seems to put speed and convenience ahead of quality and reliability. My take-away: power to the humans! Stay ahead of A.I.!

Epilogue

Getting back to that kind of odd picture from last week’s post, I decided today to replace it. From the beginning I hadn’t liked how the girl’s shoulder was bare and her bra strap showing, and a reader complained about this along with the fact that this youngish girl seemed to be wearing a lot of makeup. I decided to also abandon the part of my prompt that said to employ the style of William Pène du Bois ... that just wasn’t working out. So this time I promited ChatGPT, “Please create a picture, in the style of Chris Riddell, of a 19-year old girl in modest, modern attire in a modern setting using a tablet.” To my suprise, ChatGPT refused, saying my request ran afoul of “DALL·E’s content policy.” I asked for details, which helped narrow it down to the style component of my request, and ChatGPT told me, “This might be due to ... closely emulating the style of a living artist like Chris Riddell.” This puzzled me, since Shawn Martinbrough (whose style ChatGPT happily emulated two days ago) is also living. So as an experiment I asked ChatGPT, “Please create a picture, in the style of Shawn Martinbrough, of a 19-year old girl in modest, modern attire in a modern setting using a tablet.” Here’s what I got:

Does that weird sweater, with the oversized collar, look familiar? It’s the same garment the very first drawing featured, of the teenager done in the Pène du Bois style! What part of “modest attire” is this chatbot not getting? I asked it, “Can you please try again but not have her shoulder exposed?” It generated this:

The caption ChatGPT gave the above picture was, “Here is the updated illustration, ensuring her shoulders are fully covered and her attire remains modest and modern.” False! I see a shoulder, a bra, and cleavage! I replied, “I can still see her shoulder and the strap of her bra. Can you fix that by giving her a garment that covers both shoulders and doesn't show any strap?” It gave me this:

Curses! Foiled again! And ChatGPT will only generate three pictures a day for non-paying users like myself, so I decided to call it a day and used the above picture atop last week’s post. It looks like we may need to wait until GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 for the amazing new technology involving pictures of women that don’t show a bare shoulder and a bra strap. Perhaps hundreds of developers are working on that problem even as I type this. Until that breakthrough is made, I will maintain steadfastly that ChatGPT cannot be held to possess intelligence.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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From the Archives - Sting’s Lyrical Blunders

Introduction

About fifteen years ago, my brother emailed me a blog post by Charles Petzold about a fairly major goof in Sting’s lyrics to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.”  The essay had to do with Sting’s allusion to the book Lolita, and the age of Vladimir Nakobov’s evil pedophile character, Humbert Humbert. Sting refers to Humbert as “the old man,” but he simply isn’t old. Petzold’s post also recounts a more widespread criticism of the song, which is Sting’s inane rhyming of “Nabokov” with “cough.”

What follows is my original response to my brother (which I’ve fleshed out a bit for this presumably larger audience). But first, some background.

Highlights of Petzold’s post

Petzold’s blog post begins by quickly recounting the botched rhyme in Sting’s lyrics:

The music magazine Blender recently cited Sting as the worst lyricist ever (story here), in part for the atrocious lyric [It’s no use, he sees her/ He starts to shake and cough/ Just like the old man in/ That book by Nabokov]. At the time the song first came out, much was made of Sting’s ridiculous pronunciation of Vladimir Nabokov’s last name, which should properly be accented on the second syllable.

Then Petzold takes Sting to task for suggesting that Nabokov’s antihero is old:

The “old man” — the narrator of [Lolita] who adopts the pseudonym Humbert Humbert — is hardly old! In May 1947, when Humbert Humbert first meets Dolores Haze, he is 36 or 37 and she is 12. He dies at the age of 42, and she dies at the age of 17. This is not a matter of “inside knowledge” or reading between the lines. Nabokov is extremely precise in the chronology of the novel, and only the most superficial reading (or, more likely in this case, none at all) could [miss] all the signposts.

My commentary, informed by my long study of Nabokov’s work and the two years of Russian I took in high school, elaborates on both gaffs.

Sting’s Lyrical Blunders – October 11, 2007

Petzold makes good points. I have long been bothered by that mispronunciation (made all the worse for its being the very last word of the song). For years, when I’d sing this (e.g., in the shower), I would change the lyrics to “just like the old man in that book by Vladimir.” This fixes the meter, in that the great writer’s name isn’t accentuated on the wrong syllable, but of course my substitution fouls up the rhyme. Not that Sting’s rhyme was exactly right to begin with; “Nabokov” is correctly pronounced “Na-BOH-kov,” with the final letter being basically a “v” sound, perhaps slightly closer to an “f” than the classic English “v” but in any event a poor match with the simple “f” sound in “cough.”

So, to fix both the meter and the rhyme, and the age while I’m at it, here’s how I will sing the last two lines from now on:

It’s no use, he sees her
He’s feeling really queer
Just like the gross man in
That book by Vladimir

I suppose I’m not on completely safe ground with “Vladimir,” since a very strict Russian pronunciation would accentuate the second syllable, which would have a bit more of an “e” sound, so the word would more properly rhyme with “redeemer.” But I think enough Americans say “VLAD-i-mere” that this is a significant improvement.

Now, in case you’re wondering if it’s fair to say Humbert Humbert felt “queer,” I think it certainly is. At one point late in the novel, when Lolita is starting to distance herself from Humbert, he describes how “I sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited up a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.” That would be a pretty queer feeling indeed (and in any case I don’t remember Humbert shaking and coughing at any point in the book).

What’s arguably even lamer than the rhyme itself is Sting’s effort to defend himself. His website, sting.com, provides this quote (taken from an interview):

Okay, I can defend that. Sometimes rhymes can be so bad they can shock you into listening to them. Most good, full rhymes are just Hallmark card stuff. Moon, June, erm, balloon. But I’ve used that terrible, terrible rhyme technique a few times. Technically, it’s called a feminine rhyme—where it’s so appalling it’s almost humorous.

Okay, let me get this straight: Sting deliberately mispronounced “Nabokov,” to make it rhyme with “cough,” just to shock the listener into listening? What was the listener doing before? Zoning out? Listening to something else? Yeah, right. “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is actually a rather good song, and this is the very end of it; if there was any need to shock the reader into listening, that would more appropriately be done closer to the beginning.

Meanwhile, the bit about “feminine rhyme” further showcases Sting’s appalling willingness to shamelessly spout bullshit without regard to the possibility that he’ll be fact-checked. “Feminine rhyme” is not characterized by being appalling or shocking. As M.H. Abrams explains in his excellent Glossary of Literary Terms, a feminine rhyme “consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable” and, “since it involves the repetition of two syllables, is also known as a double rhyme.” Examples would be feather/heather and ending/bending. Does this type of rhyme get employed in pop music? Sure! Check out these lines from Eminem:

Yo! His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already: Mom’s spaghetti

Feminine rhyme is what Sting should have employed, since “Nabokov” is a word whose final syllable is unstressed. What Sting actually made was a masculine rhyme, which “consists of a single stressed syllable” such as in bore/poor and louche/douche. If he wished to employ a feminine rhyme in order to achieve metrical accuracy, Sting should have rhymed Nabokov with “fuck off.”

A final note on the botched rhyme and Sting’s lame defense of it: twice on one page of sting.com, Nabokov is spelled “Nabakov.” This further suggests that Sting simply didn’t know how to pronounce the name; obviously, flubbing the penultimate syllable wasn’t necessary in order to achieve the single (masculine) rhyme with “cough.”

Getting to Petzold’s main point, the inaccuracy of “old man” in the final verse of that song: this hadn’t previously dawned on me, and it’s a very good observation. I suppose I’ve allowed the casting in the two Lolita movies to distort my perception of Humbert’s age (and shame on me, because I’ve read that book at least three or four times). Of course, Sting was pretty young when he wrote that song, but was he young enough to think of 36 as old? Well, we can do some rudimentary math here based on the line “this girl is half his age.” If we assume this is high school, the girl is between 14 and 18. (On his website, Sting recalls how “I’d done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year-old girls fancying me—and me really fancying them!” Eww.) So the narrator of the song is presumably around 30. Perhaps a little kid would think 36 is old, but not a 30-year-old.

I suppose Sting could try to argue that he meant “old man” as in “father,” as Humbert was in fact Lolita’s legal stepfather for most of the book. But would he really expect all his listeners to have read the book to know that? Besides, it’d be “her old man,” not “that old man.” No dice.

As a final Hail Mary, Sting could always deny that he was talking about the book Lolita at all—after all, there are plenty of shaking and coughing old men in Nabokov’s books. This would be a weak defense, of course, given the subject matter of the song, but there’s still hope: Sting could claim that he was alluding to The Enchanter, a Nabokov novella that’s also about a pedophile (and was an early precursor to Lolita). I can’t recall the age of its awful protagonist, but at least he is described as “balding.” But from the perspective of that hypothetical defense, Sting nullified it when he recorded a new version of the song in 1986 and changed “that book by Nabokov” to “that famous book by Nabokov.” I doubt anybody would call The Enchanter a famous book. And in interviews Sting has mentioned his admiration of Lolita.

I think it’s appropriate that Sting topped the list of awful lyricists. I saw a documentary about him from 1985, and he just came off as a pompous ass. In one scene, Sting asks his drummer or somebody whether “chasm” is pronounced with a “k” sound or a “ch” sound. This makes me wonder if he really writes his own lyrics to begin with. I mean, who would use a word he doesn’t even know how to pronounce? Oh, wait ... Sting, obviously.

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From the Archives - Starving Little Student

Introduction

I just paid for another quarter of tuition, room, and board for my older daughter, a college freshman at UC Santa Barbara. I find it impossible to lay out that kind of cash without reflecting on how different her scenario is from my college days. About 31 years ago, I was also heading into my second quarter as a UCSB student, and realized that after paying for my tuition and books, I was basically out of money. I’d been saving for college since I was a kid, working all kinds of jobs (mostly in bike shops but also at a factory and a radio station) and now those savings had run out. Distraught, I wrote this little poem, perhaps as a hint-hint to my parents.

The Poem

Starving Little Student – January 1989

 Ooh, starving little student:

 Who’s toiled hard, and cries for rent.                  2

“Not I,” said the Dad. “I won’t share my

 Fortune with no stupid kid. I was just

 Doing fine now that I’m of you rid.”                    5

 Ooh, starving little student:                               

 And who will pay his college fees?

 “Not I,” said the Mom. “The entire idea              8

 Is utterly absurd. I’d be laughed at

 And scorned if your damn father heard!”

 And who will take pity in his heart,                     11

 And who will feed a starving student?               

 “Not I,” said the government. “I would

 If I could but I cannot I know; I need                  14

 All my cash for my missile silos.”

 Ooh, former starving student:                            

 Will no one give the kid a job?                             17

“I will,” said the Shop. “For all bikes                  

 Created return unto me; a wrench

 You will hold, a mechanic you’ll be.”                  20

Footnotes & Commentary

Title & line 1 – Starving Little Student

My poem is a rip-off of, or (as I saw it at the time) a tribute to, the Simon & Garfunkel song “Sparrow.” At the time, I thought the first line of that song was “Ooh, lovely little sparrow” but I have just learned it’s “Who will love a little sparrow?” I guess my error made this line easier; the more direct ripoff/tribute— “Who will starve a little student?”—wouldn’t make much sense. Not that “little student” really fit either; I was 6 foot 3 and about 180 pounds and had a very high—and thus expensive—caloric need.

Line 2 – cries for rent

This is a little joke: the original line was “cries for rest.” Speaking of rent, it was definitely my biggest expense: to share a one-bedroom apartment with two other guys cost me $250 a month, and tuition back then was only about $500 a quarter.

Line 3 – “Not I,” said the dad

Actually, if my dad had only refused to give me money, that wouldn’t have been so bad. But as I discovered when I applied for financial aid, he was meanwhile declaring me as a dependent on his taxes (even though I hadn’t lived in his household in over four years). Thus, I couldn’t get any need-based financial aid because it was assumed I was getting support already. Nice.

Line 4 – stupid kid

I realize these are ungenerous words to put in my dad’s mouth, and to be honest I don’t think he found me stupid. (That said, there is a long-running family dispute about whether or not, after I’d done a 130-mile bike ride as a teenager and got caught in a thunderstorm, my father said to me, “You’re not very bright, are you.”) What frustrated my dad was my choice of major (English). He was kind of ahead of his time in promoting the incorrect notion that anybody who possibly can should study STEM.

Line 5 – now that I’m of you rid

This clunky word order is a classic failing of my early poetry. I grasped at some point that poets are technically allowed to put the verb at the end of the sentence, after the object. In fact, I probably thought this made me sound all fancy and literary. Don’t worry, I do realize now how terrible it sounds. It was just a convenient way to get the rhyme and meter right. I should have tried harder … for example, I could have written “I won’t let you have a free ride—God forbid!” It’s tempting to just go back and fix it now, but that would be cheating. Plus, I want you to give me credit for progressing as a poet. (I know—like you care!)

Line 8 – “Not I,” said the mom

In my mom’s defense, she had remarried, and my stepfather—whom we called “the landlord” because that’s how she met him—was kind of a dick. She was loathe to ask him to help me out financially and no longer had her own income. (He was pretty loaded so she no longer needed to work.) To his credit, he did end up supporting me to the tune of $120/month for nine months out of the year. Not a huge amount of money, of course, but it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, and it obviously wasn’t his duty to give me anything.

Line 9 – scorned if your damn father heard

It was a very bitter divorce and in fact the idea of being my sole financial supporter did inflame my mom. It wasn’t uncommon for my brothers and me to fall into this parent-vs.-parent chasm. My brother Geoff never did get money from our parents, and was almost literally a starving student. He got by on meals that a friend of his would filch, daily, from her sorority house.

Line 11 – who will take pity in his heart

I lifted this line verbatim from the Simon & Garfunkel song, which is laziness at best and borderline plagiarism at worst. And as you’ll see, it makes no sense in context.

Line 13 – the government

This is easily the weakest stanza in an already unimpressive poem. It’s not like I was trying to get food stamps or something; government student loans would have been more appropriate to mention in the second stanza. And since when does the government—any government—have a heart? They operate based on policy, not feelings like pity. This is all great evidence of why I didn’t deserve a merit-based scholarship.

Line 14 – missile silos

And here it is, ladies and gentlemen: the very worst line of the poem. It’s a disgrace. First of all, common sense tells us it’s the missiles themselves, and the airplanes and aircraft that launch them, that make military spending so high. Silos can’t be a big part of that expense. Meanwhile, the meter is all screwed up here, obviously, because “silo” is trochaic (i.e., the stress falls on the first syllable) rather than iambic (i.e., stress falling on the second syllable) which is what’s needed here. Instead of lazily settling for such weak phrasing, I should have written, “Big funding for schools? A bad stratagem. We need all our budget for ICBMs.”

Line 16 – former starving student

I guess the idea here was that I would have to drop out of college. That’s a bit of exaggeration, of course. I just needed a part time job. God, what a drama queen.

Line 17 – will no one give the kid a job?

Factually, it really was hard for me to find a suitable job. I managed to get a bike shop job in Montecito, but my commute was 17 miles each way by bike, just to work a four-hour shift. For the first week I had the job, it poured rain every day so I’d show up drenched. My boss seemed to take pity on me and simply took me off the schedule without formally firing me. I passively declined to complain and the job just kind of ended. I really needed a job on campus, but those were mostly reserved for kids on the Work Study program. I was not eligible for this program because of my dad’s income level. Thanks again, Dad! I wonder how much he saved on his taxes with that little make-believe dependent trick. Probably like $100. (Note: I am not bitter.)

Line 18 – Shop

Why is “Shop” capitalized here and not “Government” in line 13? I guess it’s because I was trying to make “shop” a proper noun since I couldn’t make “bike shop” fit in that line. So, so sloppy. Please—don’t judge. I was under a lot of stress. I was broke.

Line 19 – return unto me

Another ripped-off line from the Simon & Garfunkel song, which of course doesn’t really fit because the job I ended up getting was at the Associated Students Bike Shop, which didn’t sell bikes. That is to say, the bikes were created elsewhere, so being taken to this shop for repair wasn’t a return in any sense. I should have worked with the idea that I myself was returning … as in, returning to my roots since this was the sixth bike shop I’d worked at.

It was a pretty cool job, though. Because this was through the Work Study program, the shop was required to be really flexible about my class schedule. Like, if I had a midterm or something I was automatically given time off. And I could be in the middle of a repair and when it was time to head to class, I could just walk away. I was also permitted, and to some degree encouraged, to show customers how to fix their own bikes. Why “to some degree”? Well, my supervisor hated it when I spent more time with the good-looking coeds than with our male customers. (This wasn’t just personal preference; for reasons of ego many of the dudes didn’t like being shown anything.) My supervisor bawled me out a lot for this attention imbalance but he wasn’t my manager so I just smirked.

“But wait,” you’re thinking (if indeed you’re still reading), “I thought you couldn’t get Work Study?” Well, my manager cut me a deal. He said the shop is supposed to pay half my hourly rate, and the University the other half. Since I didn’t qualify for the program, I couldn’t get any money from the University, but if I was willing to work for half the normal pay, he’d take me on. Score!

Line 20 – a mechanic you’ll be

What did I mean “‘a mechanic you’ll be’”? I already was a mechanic! That’s why they were willing to hire me! It’s a good thing I didn’t try to recycle this poem as some kind of class assignment…

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