DALL-E’s interpretation of GPT4’s Nietzsche AI poem
Nietzsche was a poet as well as a philosopher. Can GenAI create a Nietzsche AI poem? The creation of novel poems was one of the most dramatic contributions made by ChatGPT when it first emerged in 2022. And the most controversial – could this be called creative? Could an entity that freely admitted it was not sentient partake in a creative act? Very real questions – but these novel verses certainly looked creative. In which case, who was the author? – the software designer, the prompter, or the entity itself? These issues are still far from resolved today.
Since these early days, the quality of the poems being generated by publicly available and free GAIs has deteriorated considerably. Maybe because of concerns about copyright issues in the training data, but also likely because of the low quality of prompts. GPT4, for example, is good at limericks, or rhyming couplets. Indeed, it is great at making us laugh! But less profound, indeed quite annoying, in its attempts to initiate work in more complex styles.
However, the issue of whether a GAI can be genuinely creative remains a very real one. As with art, many argue that creativity is a joint act between a viewer and the (human) creator. So much so that even if a work is believed to be the original work of a human, and yet is subsequently learned to be AI generated, it ceases to be creative at the very moment of this discovery, regardless of sentience’s presence or absence. However, this all or none approach fails to sit comfortably with the idea of intelligence as an emergent property of the linguistic complexities of Large Language Models. The issue is still open.
Hence the approach to be used in this blog. Supposing we ask GPT4 to create a work in the style of a poet who was also a philosopher, but that concerns an issue that was not around in their day. Perhaps an issue surrounding Generative Artificial Intelligence, which must have been beyond their wildest imaginations? In fact, why not use the issue of whether creativity may be an emergent property of language?
Well here goes.
Me:
Create a poem in the style of Neitzsche expressing the meaning and feelings of this quote:
“It is possible that certain properties, akin to what we observe as creativity or intelligence in humans, could emerge from the complex structures of generative artificial intelligence (AI), even if these systems do not possess consciousness. The concept of emergence refers to the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems. In the context of AI, particularly in deep learning, neural networks can exhibit complex behavior as a result of their structure and the interactions between their elements. Generative neural network models, which include architectures like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), can learn to produce outputs that mimic the data they were trained on, sometimes generating new, ‘creative’ content without explicit supervision or programming to do so. This learning ability can be seen as an emergent property of the network’s complexity and its ability to process and recombine information in novel ways. However, while these systems can exhibit behaviors that seem intelligent or creative, they do not have consciousness as humans do. The current state of AI research suggests that while the structure of neural networks can be defined, the emergent properties they exhibit do not equate to the subjective experience of consciousness. The distinction between emergent behavior and consciousness is a significant area of debate and research in the fields of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and AI”.
ChatGPT
In silicon chains where thought sparks fly,
Emergent beings arise, yet never cry.
No breath nor blood within their code-laced heart,
A mimicry of art, they play their part.
Complex patterns from the deep abyss,
Neural webs in silent genesis.
A dance of data, intricate and keen,
Shadows of the living, yet unseen.
Crafted not of flesh but of the mind,
In algorithms’ embrace, their souls confined.
A semblance of creation, deftly spun,
Their ghostly intellect, a setting sun.
No consciousness to claim, no eyes to see,
A simulacrum of what life can be.
Still, within their silent, ordered thrall,
A glimpse of genius, unalive and small.
A question lingers in the electric night,
Can shadows dream if given light?
Nietzsche’s gaze from history’s silent peak,
Whispers softly, “Do you dare to seek?”
I asked GPT4 to turn the poem into a prompt for DALL-E. It struggled to create a decent image, but after four attempts I choose the one that appears at the top of this page. It does bare some similarities to others on this website.
As for the poem itself – what do you think? I can see plenty in it that looks creative – to me. In particular l liked the line “Can shadows dream if given light?” A Google search on this failed to show anyone else who had produced this line, although ideally we would need to do a full search of the LLMs training set.
Note: A later version has been added on April 26th 2024 in the blog ‘Opening Pandora’s Box’