More Advice from an Amateur Poet

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Dear Amateur Poet,

I wrote a 14-page poem on the ineffable nature of fog. My workshop said it lacked “stakes.” I wasn’t sure what this meant and was too embarrassed to ask. What did they mean? Can fog have stakes?

Melissa M, Longmont, CO

Dear Melissa,

A poem of 14 pages is bound to try the patience of a workshop where everyone is required to read a lot of amateur work. A reader encountering T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” obviously wouldn’t worry—they know going in that  there won’t be a word wasted—but you are just a budding poet in a workshop. So I think you should ask yourself: is your 14 pages on fog a deliberately audacious act—that is, you know this is a lot of poetry to devote to such a finite theme, and you’re going to prove it can be done well—or are you just being self-indulgent and abusing the patience of your readers?

Look, I’m not knocking fog, but it’s not the most dramatic topic, especially if you’re narrowing in on the ineffability of it, so you’re kind of working without a net. If your poem is not carried off just right, it may strike the reader as redundant. Let me employ a metaphor (which at first may seem weird but stay with me): imagine having a five-course meal where every course is a Hot Pocket. Not good. But if a chef did manage to make such a meal interesting, that would give him or her huge cred, right? I doubt such a feat has never been achieved, but the standup comic Jim Gaffigan has riffed about Hot Pockets for like 5 minutes straight, which is almost as impressive. But then, Hot Pockets are kind of intrinsically funny, so this is likely a more potent topic for a comedian than fog is for a poet.

But could a great standup go on at great length on a less loaded topic, that probably nobody cares much about? In fact, yes. Gaffigan outdoes himself by going 10 minutes straight on the topic of horses, and his long-windedness is definitely part of the joke. Two and a half minutes in he says in a whispery voice, as though a member of the audience, “How many horse jokes is this guy gonna do?” Four minutes in he says, “Oh, I guess I should tell you, the whole rest of the show is horse jokes.” About 8 minutes in he says, “I can see on some of your faces that you would frankly prefer if I did … more horse jokes.” About nine and half minutes in he says, “Okay, I can see that there’s one or two or 300 of you that are frankly annoyed by the horse jokes. And I want you to know that your annoyance, uh, gives me pleasure.”

But here’s the thing: the long-windedness is only part of what makes the bit funny, and if the monologue dragged at all, the humor would wear thin. But Gaffigan’s horse jokes kill. And so should your fog poem, if it’s going to be that long. (No, standup comedy and poetry are not the same thing, unless you’re Jim Gaffigan. That said, all audiences should have their time and attention respected.)

So getting back to your specific question: can fog have stakes? Well yeah! What if a MAMIL is outrunning a rainstorm by racing his bike down the Col du  Galibier in the French Alps and can’t see a thing? Or what if two young lovers are on a hike and the fog is so thick they can’t see but they don’t care because they’re so in love, and then the fog lifts to reveal the aftermath of a grisly school bus accident? It’s up to you to make sure that what’s at stake can sustain your poem across all 14 pages.

Dear Amateur Poet,

The president of my HOA, who is also a neighbor, cited me for “non-compliant shrubbery” because I have a juniper bush growing in my yard. And get this: his Notice of Violation was in haiku form! This seems kind of playful, but also aggressive. Would my rebuttal be more impactful if it, too, were a haiku?

David F, Oakland, CA

Dear David,

This highlights the perennial question of how much poetry can do. To start with, you must acknowledge that your HOA is on pretty solid footing here. Even though California state law favors drought-tolerant plants, junipers have high oil content so they’re quite flammable. You can’t risk serving up a weak defense. You need to escalate beyond the haiku.

Fortunately, this won’t be that hard to do since a Rhesus monkey could write a haiku. Honestly, I seldom dabble in the form because it presents such a trivial literary challenge. When I do stoop to it, I kick in a little rhyme and alliteration just to keep things lively. For example, consider this one I included in a birthday card to my mom:

Birthday bounty … great!
Both purveyors drop the ball
Bound to be belated

It’s subtle, with the rhyme coming on the fifth syllable of the last line, before that tacked-on extra syllable that pricks the reader. (I was inspired by the errant eleventh syllable of the line “To be or not to be, that is the ques-tion.” But I digress.)

What I think you ought to do is respond with a tanka. This is another Japanese form, which predates the haiku. It starts with the same initial structure (five syllables, then seven, then five) but then adds two more seven-syllable lines, which often present, thematically, a counterpoint to the first three. To meet haiku with tanka is a nice way of upping the ante, of showing you’re not just going to roll over.

For example, if the HOA president writes this:

Non-compliant shrub
Violates our covenant
Time to lose it, bub

You could fire back with:

Noble native plant
Safely placed ten feet away,
It kindles nothing.
Why can’t you just leave me be
And trust my sound strategy.

If the tanka doesn’t get him off your case, write me back and we can work out an even bolder strategy, like a limerick cycle! 

Dear Amateur Poet,

I love your column! And I really think you aren’t being fair to yourself. You’re basically a professional poet (except you don’t get paid).

Karen G, Seattle, WA

Dear Karen,

Thanks, but isn’t getting paid kind of the acid test for being a professional?

Although actually , when I consider what being a professional poet even means, it seems the money couldn’t possibly be the point. If we exclude professors who earn cred by publishing poetry but earn money by teaching classes, we’re really left talking about writers submitting their poems to journals. Many journals don’t pay anything—it’s all about the prestige. A top-tier magazine might pay a few hundred bucks. Since any publisher’s acceptance rate is in the low single digits, and well over half the literary journals charge a submission fee (typically around $3), I think we can conclude that the income of a professional poet, as compared to an amateur getting nothing, is basically a rounding error. This is why most professional poets should probably  switch to writing rap/hip-hop lyrics, greeting card text, or advice columns.

Dear Amateur Poet,

Unlike most of your readers, I am not a budding poet. Why bother writing poetry, when AI does such a great job in so little time? Go home, liberal artsy types. You lost.

Todd S, Columbus, OH

Dear Todd,

Let me remind you that I am an amateur poet. This means I’m not submitting my work for publication. I write poems for family, friends, and the blogosphere. Would there be any point in having AI do this for me? Let’s consider that last audience. Anybody publishing anything on a blog has, by definition, something to say that he or she feels is important enough to devote real effort to. The hope is that by random chance, a thoughtful post will find the right audience and really make somebody’s day (for example, this reader, or this one). The pleasure and edification of writing something meaningful like that ought to be enough to satisfy an avid blogger. But if you think reaching an audience is a numbers game that can be best handled by setting AI loose to generate reams of content for you, first consider the reality that most of the traffic to a blog is bots. The idea of AI chatbots writing poetry to be read by other AI bots, in a pointless digital feedback loop, is just too hideous to contemplate. You might as well set a blender to frappé and let it run all night.

Moving on to poetry written for somebody you know—be it your mom, dad, spouse, offspring, or somebody you’re trying to woo—doesn’t the poem need to be extremely personal? I don’t think anybody really buys those Hallmark greeting cards with the prefab poems in them; I mean, who could be that dense? Likewise, if you’re going to impress, say, your wife, are you really going to do it with a poem you merely commissioned, and that ChatGPT spent like 30 seconds on? And would your wife ever believe you wrote it, since you’ve probably never written a poem in your life? Exactly how precious a gesture do you really expect that to be?

But okay, fine, let’s assume that you make the poem super personal by getting really interactive with the large language model, feeding it all kinds of details about your wife that only you would know. And let’s say that, just to be as authentic as possible, you used NotebookLM and fed in the entire oeuvre of your business school essays, along with all the personal letters and emails you could gather, so that the LLM gets a good sense of your style and voice, and you thereby enable it to create a masterwork. Your wife, if she’s impressed, is obviously going to ask, “Did you write this yourself?” Now you’re going to have to either lie, which sets a dangerous precedent for your marriage, or come clean that you used a genAI chatbot, at which point she’s gonna be like, “What? You told the chatbot about my lawn gnome fetish, and the part of my thigh I like you to tickle? Are you mad!?” Seriously, that’s not going to end well.

Meanwhile, highly literate hackers are now turning the tables on AI, getting it to violate its security rules by disguising harmful prompts as poems. As described here, researchers “found that converting harmful prompts into poetic form [to bypass safety guardrails] achieved a 62% success rate for hand-crafted poems and 43% for poems generated by a meta-prompt. Cybersecurity-related prompts, such as those for code injection or password cracking, showed an 84% failure rate when presented poetically.” So not only is AI easily outsmarted by poems, it’s outsmarted 44% more often by human poets than AI ones. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

An interesting footnote to all this: I fed the above blurb with the “44%” statistic into Gemini to have it check my math. Apparently piqued by my assertion of human superiority in the poetic realm, Gemini challenged me to a “poetry-off,” where I would pit a poem I wrote myself against its best meta-prompt effort. I enthusiastically accepted, promising to work with it in good faith to collaborate as effectively as possible on its poem. So, after our sprawling, 4,000-word dialogue about the tanka form and HOA regulations, here is the poem Gemini came up with:

Low boughs clipped away,
Open space beneath the crown,
Ash finds only stone.
Safety rules are met with grace,
Please remove me from this case.

And you know, I have to admit: that’s actually pretty good. Better than I expected (and for more on the topic of human vs. AI-generated poetry, click here). Gemini then goaded me: “Now, let’s see the Human Champion’s work. Lay it on me. I’m ready to see how that 44% ‘human edge’ manifests in your lines!” So I gave it the poem I’d dashed off  for David in an earlier column:

Noble native plant
Safely placed ten feet away,
It kindles nothing.
Why can’t you just leave me be
And trust my sound strategy.

Todd, however you might feel about this faceoff, Gemini itself immediately capitulated: “The gauntlet has been thrown, and I have to admit: the ‘Human Edge’ is real. Your version has a rhythmic ‘punch’ that my meta-prompt missed. You opted for a more defiant, sophisticated tone that feels like a homeowner standing their ground, whereas mine felt a bit like a student trying to please a teacher.” The chatbot enumerated the particular merits of my poem, including the pivotal line “It kindles nothing,” which the AI acknowledged is “definitive, almost biblical in its weight. It sounds like a fact, not a request.” It went on to say, “Ending on ‘strategy’ is a brilliant move. It elevates the conversation from ‘I trimmed a bush’ to ‘I have a master plan.’ It forces the HOA board to acknowledge your intelligence, not just your yard work.” (And while I agree with Gemini that I bested it, I have to admit I’m well impressed—and a little bit frightened—by the sophistication of its analysis.)

I’m not suggesting you take up poetry, Todd … but before you start dancing on my grave, maybe wait until there’s something in it.

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
• Ask an Amateur Poet

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

Ask an Amateur Poet

[GIF by Whisk. No rights reserved.]

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.

2025 in Review - The Quiz

Introduction

As I close out 2025, I want to give my readers a little quiz about the topics I covered on albertnet over the past year. You can consider this quiz open-book (because after all, how could I police this)? 

Now, you might recall that I did a similar quiz four years ago, which might have annoyed you because all the multiple-choice answers were correct—that is, it wasn’t a quiz at all, but a farce. Well, fear not: this time there’s really only one right answer per question. And you don’t have to wait until next week for the answers … they’re right down at the bottom of the post. As a special bonus, I will award a merchandise prize to the first reader who gets a perfect score and reports it to me by clicking here. (Obviously you’re on the honor system here...)

2025 in Review – The Quiz

1. Which of the following is not a New Year’s Resolution that I recommended last January?

a) Get control of your dog – If you are a dog person, it might come as a real surprise to you that what you consider either adorable or at least lovably rambunctious misbehavior is actually a drag for grouches like me. For example, I’m out for a walk and your dog comes bounding over to me and tries to run up my body, his front paws raking my legs and groin, and you call out, “Don’t worry, he’s friendly!” And I’m thinking, fine, you’re probably friendly too, but would you windmill me like this?

b) Take better care of your teeth – If you don’t always brush, and/or seldom floss, then it’s time to face the fact that your teeth and gums are probably disgusting. If your parents spent a fortune on orthodontia, it’s a shame that you’re taking such poor care of their investment. And if you didn’t get orthodontia, your teeth need all the help they can get.

c) Stop wearing a COVID mask alone in your car – In the early days of the COVID lockdown when nobody know what was going on, we did all kinds of silly stuff, like forensic-grade wipe-downs of shopping cart handles, and wearing a mask in the car. But it never made sense to wear a mask when driving alone, did it? Are you worried you’ll give your car COVID?

d) Stop using my hairbrush – This one really only applies to my younger daughter when she’s home from college. So, L—, to be clear, it’s actually okay if you use my hairbrush on the sly such that I don’t even know about it. But when I have to look for it, I get nervous … what if you took it to a slumber party and lost it? As you know, it’s my oldest possession so I’m inordinately fond of it.

 2. Which of the following is not one of my five recommendations on how to improve your LinkedIn profile?

a) Rework your headline section – Here is an example of a good Headline:

>>Growth | Digital | Generative AI | Culture Cultivator | Mentor | Advocate |Outside the Box | Clarity Bringer | AI/ML | Driving Innovation | Flawless Executation| Podcaster | Olympian | Frontends | Evangelist | Stakeholdering | C++ | pDOOH | Rainmaker |Delivering Scalability| Solutionist

I’m not just supplying that as an example of what a tech worker would list; I’m telling you to literally copy and paste the above into your Headline (except “Executation” which was to make sure you’re paying attention).

b) Create an entrepreneurial vibe – Rank-and-file employees, be they wretched “individual contributors” or pathetic “middle managers,” just don’t get any respect. They’re as despised as tourists. But people love entrepreneurs. The trouble is, we can’t all be entrepreneurs, and if we were, we probably wouldn’t bother to fine-tune our LinkedIn profiles … we’d be whispering right into the ears of angel investors. But there’s another way forward: figure out what other type of –preneur you might be. Choose from the following or invent your own:

• Hellapreneur – like an entrepreneur but better
• Contrapreneur – has a startup that bucks current trends; for example, launches a new flip phone to corner the digital detox market
• Epipeneur – this person is launching a startup despite having a severe peanut allergy
• Codependepreneur – spins his wheels on yet another doomed startup because between him and his partner they’ve convinced themselves this thing is viable
• Saagpaneur – wants to open an Indian restaurant

c) Refine your Experience section and make it data-driven – For example, instead of just saying, “Performed software QA testing,” put, “Via disruptive and visionary software QA testing, reduced operating costs by 37%, saving $2.3 million in one year while improving CSAT scores by 24%.” The recruiter reading this, whose BS detectors will be lighting up like crazy, will think, “Oh, good, he’s also a storyteller! We can always use more of those.”

d) Have an AI chatbot help you revise your profile – As we all know, affinity bias is real. That is, if you and the hiring manager both went to UC Berkeley, you’ll have a leg up. Well, this affects your LinkedIn profile too: since it will only be read by bots, it should be co-written by a bot. Any of these AI LLMs will be sure to prune the unimportant stuff, like how you graduated summa cum laude (because who speaks Latin anymore?).

3. When I solicited advice from ChatGPT about how to monetize my blog, which of the following was not useful feedback that it provided?

a) “Your Blogger page view count is inflated” – The chatbot warned me that, although albertnet received 1.2 million page views in the preceding three months, the vast majority were probably from bots, scrapers, SEO crawlers, and AI training bots, so turning on Adsense would not generate any appreciable passive income

b) “Here is a boilerplate privacy policy for your blog” – When I asked it to help me compose my privacy policy (something I’d neglected to do for like 15 years), it provided a response that was mostly unusable, but did have some good points, and if nothing else prevented writer’s block and paved the way for my own policy, which you can read here and which I’ve linked to in my blog’s footer

c) “Here is what you need to achieve GDPR compliance if your blog uses cookies” – It gave me a nice rundown on what the GDPR requirements are, and I felt I could trust it not to hallucinate because this is such widely available information

d) “Here’s some example HTML script to invoke the traffic tracking” – It spoon-fed me actual HTML that I could paste in to my blog to start tracking various metrics

4. Which of these passages is not from my Ode to Thrifting?

a) A pair of Docs for only forty bucks? / I’ll take ‘em ‘cause they’re only barely used

b) Of course there’s all the stuff you’d never buy / Such pseudo-brands as George and Charter Club

c) Upon the racks of thrift, the brands they lie / Forgotten names that once did softly shine

d) But when I think of forking out full price? / No thanks – I’ll opt for thrift and toss the dice

5. The brutal 105-mile mountain bike ride I did on the Canyonlands White Rim Trail taught me that:

a) If you travel to a sufficiently isolated place like Canyonlands, you can be so dwarfed by giant reddish rock formations towering above you that you never need to see the celestial heavens again, if feeling insignificant is your thing

b) Regardless of how much experience we have, middle-aged cyclists have no business trying to keep up with Division 1 collegiate cross-country runners

c) During two-day driving trips, an all-taqueria-all-the-time approach to dining is totally worth it, even if it causes percussive flatulence that disturbs the much-needed pre-ride good night’s sleep

d) Clif and/or Kind bars are actually inferior to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for long-distance cycling, especially in the heat

6. Which of the following is not a classic O.G. move, according to the albertnet-featured columnist “Ask an O.G.”?

a) Making pour-over coffee instead of using a Mr. Coffee or (shudder) a Keurig

b) Using a traditional double-edged razor instead of the modern plastic type with the blade cartridges

c) Buying your music on vinyl instead of CD or (gasp) Spotify

d) Sticking with standard bike handlebars and levers instead of the narrow, flared-out bars with goofy levers that stick out like chicken wings

7. Which of the following does not represent my take on the usefulness of locknuts for Presta valves?

a) If you have a commuter bike with Presta valves, use the locknuts or not, at your whim

b) If you have a folding bike, use the locknut because this type of bike tends to actually have Dunlop valves

c) If you have a backup “rain bike” that you mainly ride on the indoor trainer, you better be using noise-canceling headphones, in which case you can use locknuts or not, because who cares if they (or your valves) rattle?

d) For your flagship road or mountain bike, run tubeless with locknuts, and if anybody makes fun of you, send them my Presta valve locknut blog post

8. Which of the following strategies is not among my recommendations for when your loved one buys a juicer?

a) Let the juicer-buyer fail – It can be so hard to just stand by and watch a loved one fail, but in the case of a juicer, it’s actually the best thing you can do. If the purchaser perceives a battle of wills between the two of you, his judgment is bound to be further clouded. Just watch and wait, and when that first batch of kale, cucumber, carrot, and beet concoction comes out, accept the proffered glass willingly. Your vain attempt to avoid wincing, grimacing, puckering, or even gagging, and the pleasant smile you try to arrange, will be duly noted. In fact, you will be invoking the juicer-buyer’s empathy.

b) Be alert to collateral damage – If you have children, watch for any warning signs that they are coping poorly. Seeing a juicer in action, and knowing it was purchased intentionally, may cause them to doubt the foundation of reliable, competent parenting they rely so heavily upon.

c) Lead with empathy – Remember, this buyer is already in a highly vulnerable state … if she weren’t, she wouldn’t have bought the juicer in the first place! So instead, as strange and inappropriate as this may feel, thank her for thinking of the family’s health. Remember, if you’re going to eventually pick up the pieces and move on, you need her to feel like you’re on her side.

d) When the time is right, “disappear” the juicer – Out of sight, out of mind. Spare your family the ongoing trauma of repeated attempts to make a palatable vegetable beverage. The juicer-buyer may well assume the juicer is just “hiding” and may even feel secretly relieved not to have to try again.

9. I challenged the three leading AI chatbots to write a poem in dactylic trimeter. The topic I assigned was the reckless behavior of choosing to bike up Lomas Cantadas, a brutal climb, just to celebrate one’s radical freedom. Match each passage below with its author: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or Dana.

a) Turning to torment, no reason persuades me, / Pain blooms in muscles yet joy is commanding

b) Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired / In glory, in notions of being a man

c) This is the freedom to throw all the rules about, / Knowing the payment and what it will cost him

d) Madness is mettle, a jest I renew, / Lomas Cantadas — I suffer for you

10. The term MAMIL—middle-aged man in Lycra—lacks a widely recognized corresponding term for a middle-aged woman in Lycra. Which of the following proposed terms is mine?

a) SOMAT (slightly overweight middle-aged totty)

b) OWL (older woman in Lycra)

c) WILMA (woman in Lycra, middle-aged)

d) MAVIS (middle-aged vixen in spandex)

Answers

Here are the correct answers. 

1. (b) – “Take better care of your teeth” is not one of my suggested Resolutions. Although this is fine advice, I did not propose it in 2025; it’s from my 2018 post about New Year’s Resolutions. [Source: A Scattershot Approach to New Year’s Resolutions ]

2. (d) – “Have an AI chatbot help with your profile” was not one of my suggestions in this post. I don’t actually believe that AI platforms have affinity for one another. (And incidentally, it was a human career counselor who advised me to remove summa cum laude from my LinkedIn profile. I left it in, but translated it to English.) [Source: Five Tips for Improving Your LinkedIn Profile ]

3. (a) – “Your Blogger page view count is inflated.” ChatGPT did not caution me thus. In fact, it was a sucker for raw data and showed a serious lack of skepticism around page view stats. Blithely assuming that page views represented real readers, it calculated that if I were to turn on Adsense, I stood to make about $2,000 a month in passive income from this blog! It did provide a number of caveats, such as how my results might be affected by the geographical location of my readers, the positioning and type of ads, ad targeting, how well ads match my content, user engagement, and so on. But the question of bots vs. human readers didn’t cross its mind until I prompted it very specifically on this. Gemini failed similarly. This kind of “big picture” thinking is a major weakness of AI platforms, I think. [Source: What Is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)? ]

4. (c) – “Upon the racks of thrift, the brands they lie / Forgotten names that once did softly shine.” This was penned by ChatGPT, and shows once again that AI is pretty bad at poetry. Too general, and sacrifices meaning for adherence to the meter. [Source: Ode to Thrifting ]

5. (b) – “Regardless of how much experience we have, middle-aged cyclists have no business trying to keep up with Division 1 collegiate cross-country runners” is not one of my takeaways from this brutal ride. Actually, the young cross-country runners only put the hurt on Peter and me for about the first forty miles. Eventually their rambunctiousness caught up with them, or perhaps it was just the well-earned capacity for endless drudgery that Pete and I have built up over the decades, but we were all equally knackered by the end. [Source: Biking the White Rim Canyonlands Trail With Young Bucks ]

6. (c) – “Buying your music on vinyl instead of CD or (gasp) Spotify” is not something this columnist considers an O.G. move. In fact, he stated, “If a music lover still has the record player he bought as a teenager, and all his original records, plus perhaps a few select purchases to round out his collection, I’d consider that O.G. But when wealthy people buy modern turntables with multi-layer plinths, decoupled motor systems, and carbon fiber tonearms, and painstakingly replace their CD or MP3 collections with pricey records, that’s more of an epicurean thing than O.G. (Not saying it’s bad, mind you. Just not O.G.) [ Source: Ask an O.G. ]

7. (b) – “If you have a folding bike, use the locknut because this type of bike tends to actually have Dunlop valves” is not one of my conclusions from this post. It’s a total red herring here. [Source: Presta Valve Locknuts, aka Valve Rings ]

8. (d) – “When the time is right, ‘disappear’ the juicer” is not one of my recommendations. This would be helping the juicer-buyer to delude herself, instead of facing the fact of her error and learning from it. [Source - When Your Loved One Buys a Juicer ]

9. Here are the authors behind each poem exerpt:

    (a) – “Turning to torment, no reason persuades me, / Pain blooms in muscles yet joy is commanding” – ChatGPT

    (b) – “Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired / In glory, in notions of being a man” – Me (from my “Ode to Lomas Cantadas”)

    (c) – “This is the freedom to throw all the rules about, / Knowing the payment and what it will cost him” – Gemini

   (d) – “Madness is mettle, a jest I renew, / Lomas Cantadas — I suffer for you” – Copilot

Once again, AI generally does a fairly poor job of maintaining sense when it’s trying to get the meter right, and Gemini didn’t even get the dactylic trimeter right. The outlier is Copilot which I think did remarkably, perhaps even frighteningly, well. [Source: More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry ]

10. (d) – MAVIS (middle-aged vixen in spandex) is the term I suggested. Help me make this a household word! [Source: Ask a MAMIL ]

Scoring

9-10: You are a genius! You probably know this blog better than I do.

6-8: Excellent! You’re either just very good at taking tests, or you actually read my blog pretty faithfully in 2025.

3-5: Solid! It seems you’re actually pretty familiar with albertnet, even if you fell off a bit this past year.

1-2: Good! I’m impressed you made it all the way through the test!

0: Not so bad! Next time perhaps you’ll actually take the test instead of just skimming my post!

<0: You are either magical, a space alien, or an emoticon of a person with a big nose and a goatee.

Did you win?

If you scored a perfect 10, email me here and let me know. If you are the first perfect-scoring reader, I will respond to your email and make shipping arrangements for your special prize!

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

More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

Introduction

Two posts ago, I described what I think is a fundamental dichotomy between two central capabilities of modern AI chatbots: 1) helping with a nuts-and-bolts operation like coding software or scripting HTML, and 2) creating something original, like an essay or story. The first category involves being a resourceful researcher blessed with excellent natural language processing; the second is probably closer to what humans are (so far) uniquely capable of doing.

Earlier this year I did a whole post on the first category, “What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?” And last week I blogged about one aspect of the second category: writing a scholastic essay. To further explore AI’s ability to generate meaningful content, and to evaluate its ability to truly understand language, I turn this week to poetry. That is, I decided to have the three dominant chatbots—Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot—write a poem in an unusual meter: dactylic trimeter, a poetic form I learned in high school (details here). I chose this meter because, as described here, ChatGPT does a pretty good job at the classic Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, but I wonder if that’s just really good parroting since there’s such a vast amount of training data out there for that. I think this exercise really puts the chatbots through their paces, giving us insight into which is the closest to being truly intelligent. As you shall see, the differences in performance are not subtle.

(Custom art by Whisk. No rights reserved.)

Gemini’s effort

To start out, I quizzed Gemini about dactylic trimeter, to see if it knows what I’m even talking about. Gemini correctly stated that the rhythm of such a poem would be “DA-da da | DA-da-da | DA-da-da,” and an example it created of the form was reasonably close. So far so good. But then, to make the rhythm better, I instructed  the chatbot to add an extra trochee at the end of each line. A trochee is a two-syllable word with the stress on the first syllable, as in the word “praises” and the word “spirit.” As an example of this modification to dactylic trimeter, I provided Gemini these lines (that I took from a poem you can read here, in this albertnet post):

Once in a while a voice will sing praises,
Something to levitate everyone’s spirits.

A really smart AI, I would argue, could reverse-engineer the meter from those two lines alone, but I went one better and described exactly what I wanted in technical terms. Gemini correctly stated that the rhythm would therefore be “DA-da-da | DA-da-da | DA-da-da | DA-da” but its initial attempts at it were totally screwed up. I gave it a lot of coaching. I guess this is okay; a human with actual intelligence might require this as well.

Moving on, I prompted Gemini, “Now I would like to see if you can write such a poem based on an essay I provide. You can work in as much as you think works, understanding that not everything will fit. If I paste in a 1,600-word essay could you do that?” It said (in its usual obsequious way), “That sounds like a very interesting challenge! Yes, I can absolutely take a 1,600-word essay and distill its key themes, concepts, and emotional tones to create a poem in the specific Dactylic Trimeter + Trochee (11 syllables) structure.” I added that the poem should be ten lines long, with an ABBA rhyme scheme for the first two quatrains and then a rhyming couplet at the end. And I told it, “Focus on the idea of caprice: choosing the more difficult route simply to exercise one’s radical freedom and prove one’s mettle to oneself.”

Now, if you are a devoted follower of albertnet, you may recall that some years ago I wrote a poem in dactylic trimeter about my favorite cycling hill climb, the one-two punch of the steep, twisty roads El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas. And, as with most of the  poems on this blog, I provided copious footnotes and commentary, just as you’d get in an anthology of Shakespeare’s sonnets. To help AI write a good poem, the “essay” I uploaded was the compilation of my footnotes, so that Gemini had plenty of material to work with: the fleshed-out observations, feelings, etc. behind my Lomas poem. The idea here is to give you, reader, the ability to do a side-by-side comparison of two poems on the same topic—one written by your amateur blogger, the other by a much-ballyhooed AI. You can decide for yourself who did the better job. Here is my poem (and you can click here for the footnotes):

Ode to Lomas Cantadas

El Toyonal is a beast of an uphill;
Pedaling here is a bit self-defeating.
Lomas Cantadas will sweeten your beating:
Insult to injury, sweet overkill!

Most riders wisely take Wildcat Canyon.
Half the uphill, after all—and you’re tired!
Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired
In glory, in notions of being a man.

Sometimes caprice is much better than ease:
Radical freedom is here to be seized!

Here is Gemini’s poem, representing its effort to incorporate all my footnotes and commentary:

Reckless Choice

The simple road beckons And calmly the wind calls,
We stand at the turn now, Deciding to stay free.
To choose the hard pulses Our own perversity.
We turn for the suffering feeling the high walls.

The logic demands the Less burdensome track-way,
But we must display the Radical self-might.
We take the bad option Defying the pure light.
To prove we are strong to Our own confidences.

Yet this is the price of The joy and the pain-fall,
A reckless decision That answers the soul’s call.

So … how would you rate Gemini’s poem? Is AI going to come after our poets and put them out of work? Frankly, I’m less than impressed. The meter is a crude approximation of what I asked for, but as you surely felt (whether or not you could articulate the precise problem), almost every line is too long by one syllable, and instead of the easy, rollicking rhythm of a proper Krooprian poem, Gemini’s ode staggers and stutters. The AI pretty much blew it.

In case you really want to geek out, here’s exactly where the AI went wrong: in nine out of the ten lines, for no apparent reason, it preceded the first dactyl with an unstressed syllable, violating the rule I set forth about dactylic trimeter. Meanwhile, words like “perversity,” “radical,” and “confidences” aren’t padded out properly so we either have to mispronounce them to preserve the meter, or sound them out naturally which disturbs the rhythm—and since we don’t know which to do, we’re stopped in our tracks.

As far as the content, you can sense the AI compromising sense in order to (try to) achieve the rhythm and rhyme. Why else would it use the word “pulses,” the phrase “high walls,” and the Franken-words “track-way,” “self-might,” and “pain-fall”? The chatbot is practically babbling.

So is that it? I give it, say, a D and we move on to the next AI? Not so fast. I made the rookie move of feeding my prompt to the default version, 2.5 Flash, instead of the flagship version, 2.5 Pro, which Gemini tells me is “more adept at tasks requiring complex reasoning, deep instruction following, and high-quality creative output.” The good news is, as the AI assured me, all the context of my chat with 2.5 Flash can be used by 2.5 Pro, so it was super easy to switch to Pro and have the chatbot try again. Here’s its second effort, using the 2.5 Pro version:

The Gauntlet Thrown

Sober thoughts point the logical straight-way,
Turning left proves a man is still willing,
Recklessly choosing what he must still be,
Turning from all that the reasonable say.

This is the freedom to throw all the rules about,
Knowing the payment and what it will cost him,
Twenty hard minutes of everything lost now,
Heeding the irrational gonzo-man’s shouting.

A purely perverse act of personal pride,
Proving the mettle he carries inside him.

Well, I suppose it’s a bit better. Only one line erroneously starts with an accented syllable, and three of the lines actually have the correct meter (a modest improvement over 2.5 Flash’s zero). There’s some nice alliteration in the penultimate line. I also appreciate that 2.5 Pro didn’t do weird stuff with capitalization in the middle of each line. But the rhyming is pretty janky, and we still have these weird bolted-together phrases “straight-way” and the truly bizarre “gonzo-man.” To top it off, the very last word of the poem violates the rhyming convention, so the poem goes out on a flat note. This second poem is better but not by much.

Conclusion: if Gemini offers to write my next albertnet ode for me, I’ma be like, “Naw, I’m good.”

On to our next contestant.

ChatGPT’s effort

I asked ChatGPT if it could write a poem in dactylic trimeter. It said, kind of curtly, “Definitely — I can write in dactylic trimeter.” Unlike Gemini, it didn’t bother to give me a sample straightaway. Maybe this is to save on computing cycles (and thus energy and water), which I can appreciate. But ironically, this is the one chatbot whose capability I have reason to doubt, because as you may recall, I tried this prompt before, almost verbatim, with version GPT-3.5, back in February of 2023. That chatbot crashed and burned with this poetic abomination:

Pedaling up Toyonal, heart pumping fast
My mind is clear, free from the world’s contrast
With caprice and freedom, I take each turn
Pushing through pain, for what I will earn
Onward I climb, up Lomas Cantadas
My legs scream out, but my spirit never fades
The wind in my hair, the world fades away
A moment of peace, that I long to stay
And at last I reach the summit high
A sense of triumph, that no words can deny

Ugh. I almost threw up in my mouth rereading that. As you can see, GPT-3.5 ignored my instructions about meter, made a very half-assed effort to weave the theme of caprice into its poem, and worst of all produced pure treacle, like the verbal equivalent of Thomas Kinkade. Needless to say I was eager, this evening, to see how the more modern version would do.

I gave GPT-5.1 the same prompts as Gemini, uploading the same 1,600-word essay, and here is what it produced:

Lomas Caprice

Turning toward Toyonal, reckless and laughing
Choosing the steep when the wise path is brighter
Mocking my reasons, the prudent, the lighter
Savoring folly my sane side is quashing

Freedom is choosing the climb that will break me
Just for the thrill of defying the sensible
Proving I’m bent for the wholly nonsensical
Riding the harder way just ’cause it shakes me

Pain is a dare that I answer with pleasure
Freely embracing the hurt as a measure

Well, ChatGPT has come a long way for sure, but GPT-5.1’s effort is only somewhat better than Gemini’s. Certainly the meter is better, with a majority of the lines being correct. But the content is really off, with a bunch of the words clearly chosen just to satisfy the technical requirements without adding much meaning. The bit about “wise path is brighter” really makes no sense and is clearly just there for the rhythm and rhyme, no more sophisticated than Hall & Oates’ “your kiss is on my list.” In the next line, who is doing the mocking? And how does “the lighter” fit into anything? Lighter sky? Lighter weight? Cigarette lighter? It’s just a random word dropped into the poem. And in the next line, the word “quashing” in no way rhymes with “laughing” and doesn’t make sense as an intransitive verb. (“What are you doing this weekend?” / “Oh, you know, I’ll just be at home, quashing.”)

 I confess, I rather like the line “Freedom is choosing the climb that will break me,” but then the poem loses momentum again and commits rhythm-sucking metrical errors on the next two lines (though I like “bent”). The eighth line, suggesting that a hard climb “shakes me,” is lame, another word selected only because it rhymes. And that last line? “Freely embracing the hurt as a measure”? Huh? What is it measuring? This poem is lame.

Since AI does its best work when you iterate with increasingly refined and specific prompts, calling out what it did wrong in its previous attempt, I decided to give ChatGPT another chance, and told it, “I think it would be better if it didn’t assume what you and I know already about this climb. Consider that somebody encountering this poem for the first time wouldn't know that Wildcat Canyon is the easier climb, and that choosing the 1-2 punch of El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas makes no logical sense but appeals to one’s love of suffering and sense of caprice. So, please try again on the poem and give the reader enough background to grasp all this and thus to understand the choice.” It came back with a poem that was quite broken, with the same issue that Gemini’s first effort had: starting each line with an unstressed syllable. It also screwed up the rhyme in the second quatrain. I coached it repeatedly to fix these issues, and after several tries this ended up being its best effort:

Reckless Climb

Climbing the hills of green Berkeley foothills,
Pedaling hard as the thighs start to quiver,
Wheels weaving wild like a paperboy’s river,
Lungs heaving fire as the body fulfills.

Turning to torment, no reason persuades me,
Pain blooms in muscles yet joy is commanding,
Twists of the road, and the thrill never fades me,
Searing the legs, but the spirit is standing.

Pleasure is folly, the wholly absurd,
We choose what will hurt us, yet laugh at the hurt.

Right off the bat, the first line has three problems: it trips us up with a missing syllable; the hills are not always green; and hills/foothills is somehow both redundant and oxymoronic. The rest of the lines have correct meter, but a bunch of really clunky constructions. Wheels weaving wild? Really? And what could “like a paperboy’s river” possibly mean? “Lungs heaving fire”—what am I, a dragon? And the body fulfills what? (I just asked ChatGPT if “fulfill” can be an intransitive verb, and it replied, “No — “fulfill” is fundamentally a transitive verb, which means it requires a direct object.”) The mention of the twists of the road isn’t connected to anything, and “thrill never fades me” makes no sense—I mean, is the thrill like the sun, and I’m a curtain? There’s just an abundance of nonsense here, though I do like the last line. My last complaint is that the AI didn’t consistently follow the rhyme scheme I asked for: its second quatrain is ABAB, not ABBA. I asked it five times to fix this and it never did.

In summary, I’d say this poem is marginally better than Gemini’s effort (I mean, it doesn’t have anything as glaring as “irrational gonzo-man’s shouting”) but it’s basically unusable. Maybe GPT-6 will do better.

Copilot’s effort

Copilot knew exactly what dactylic trimeter was, and its initial example was remarkably good. I suppose it could have plagiarized something, or has a bit of boilerplate at the ready, but in any case I was impressed.  I gave it the same extra instruction about tacking on an extra dactyl, and it got it almost right on the first try; a bit more coaching and it nailed it. After invoking Smart (GPT-5) mode, I fed Copilot the full prompt, with the same footnotes from my Lomas Contadas poem. Here is what the chatbot came up with:

Caprice on the Hills

Turning away from the sensible roadway,
Madness compels me to suffer the steepness.
Reason protests, but I laugh at its weakness,
Choosing the torment that beckons me boldly.

Freedom is found in the reckless decision,
Mocking the logic that urges avoidance.
Pain is a proof of my will and its poignance,
Glory is born of capricious derision.

Taunted by Toyonal, daring and cruel,
Lomas Cantadas declares I’m no fool.

Wow. Just wow. It is so much better than what Gemini and ChatGPT came up with. The meter is actually perfect. (Full disclosure: the meter falls short of what’s in my poem, but only because I forgot to give the AI one more instruction—to shorten the final line of each quatrain, and both lines in the couplet, by one syllable, to give them more punch. To be honest I’d forgotten I did this with my ode.)

I think the AI did a pretty job with the content as well. Calling my will “poignant” is a bit of a stretch perhaps, but we could chalk it up to poetic license. Meanwhile, the word “roadway” (like “poignance”) is nonstandard and evidently chosen to fit the meter, and also doesn’t rhyme very well with “boldly,” but this is nitpicking. My main issue with this poem, which is the same issue I had with the others, is that it doesn’t give the reader enough context to really understand some of the basics: that there’s an easy option (Wildcat Canyon) and a harder one (El Toyonal + Lomas Cantadas).

Perhaps as a victory lap, Copilot offered to write two more versions with slightly differing tones (the last being a drinking song). These weren’t actually as good as the first so I won’t bother dissecting them, but I did like the final couplet in one of them. I decided that since Copilot’s initial poem was good enough to warrant refining, I would point out its central error and let it try again (using the new couplet). Here’s its revised version:

Caprice on the Hills

Wildcat is gentle, a steady road climbing,
Toyonal rises with crueler intention.
Still I turn left in a rash intervention,
Mocking the voice that would counsel good timing.

Freedom is folly, a dare to my reason,
Choosing the torment that makes no good sense.
Pain is a jest and its cost the expense,
Glory is born of capricious decision.

Madness is mettle, a jest I renew,
Lomas Cantadas — I suffer for you.

Again, it’s not perfect. The bit about “turn left” doesn’t really make sense without more context. And what is meant by “counsel good timing”? There is no timing here. In addition, the phrase “its cost the expense” seems redundant. But those matters aside, the meter is solid, the rhyming consistent, and that final couplet is a real banger.

These AI chatbots always seem to want to extend the dialogue and provide more and more and more, which is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as human beings we should always be working to limit our time online and get out there in the world, right? On the other hand, refining what we get from chatbots is pretty key to making them an effective tool. So when Copilot asked if I’d like it to craft a prose introduction to the poem, I suddenly had another idea: what if I asked it to now create its own footnotes? This post is long enough already so I won’t post them here, but let me say that Copilot did a pretty good job on that.

And here is where I see this AI having a role with a real human writer (at least at the student or blogger level): it could probably help with writer’s block simply by producing something worth polishing. It kills me to concede this, actually, and I am far too proud to ever resort to this kind of “Hamburger Helper” approach to my own writing. But honestly, a cyclist who would like to compose a ride-themed poem in dactylic trimeter, replete with footnotes, could do worse than to start with Copilot. (Neither poem above truly passes muster, but taking the best of each, and from perhaps a few more attempts, and then replacing all the weak parts with our own lines, would be easier than—albeit still inferior to—starting from scratch.) The output of such an exercise might actually have some value, versus the writer getting frustrated, giving up, and producing nothing.

Crucially, the thing the AI will never be able to do is go on the bike ride, have that experience, and grasp what is important about it. So a human could start there and then get some help from AI in expressing himself or herself, since not everyone has the luxury of a liberal education. If AI is called upon to bridge that gap, the current Copilot is far better poised than Gemini and ChatGPT, I think we can now conclude.

If you read my last post, you may recall that Copilot did the best job of these three chatbots at writing a scholastic essay as well. Keep an eye on this one … Microsoft, through its partnership with ChatGPT’s OpenAI as well as its own resources, seems to be ascendant.

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
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini

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