#8: Breakfast with Robots
Chatbots say the darnedest things.
It used to be that you could definitely tell if “Susan” was a real person or not. But artificial intelligence keeps getting realer and realer (and curiouser and curiouser).
We recently took GPT-2 ( an unsupervised transformer language model) for a spin to coauthor some short stories and poems.
The premise is simple:
Open Talk to Transformer
Change the setting to “custom prompt”
Write the first sentence or two of your story or poem, and then have GPT-2 complete the text.
Pick what you like (a word, a phrase, a stanza) to add to your original prompt, and then repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have a final version.
Share your work with us by leaving a comment, or check out our fresh cuts below.
An angular shadow
A young man idles on a Honda motorcycle pulled to the side of the dark asphalt on the A75 south of Kandahar. The wind is persistent at his back, holding him steady and allowing a nudge of relief against the sheer wet heat of his skin. The acrid smell of ancient musk drifts up, his jet-black hair an angular shadow. The young man’s eyes take in a kaleidoscope of sights: the silhouettes of the mountains, trees lining the road in front of him, the unmistakable depression of an Afghan fieldstone resting in the gravel lane beside him. His mind drifts back to the Kabul rooftop where he once listened to songs of a young girl with a throaty voice. He was to learn later that he had actually heard the young woman’s song on the radio and when her voice flowed into the room and seeped through the cement walls, he joined her on the rooftop and became convinced he had made a miracle, with a dark sense of humor and eyes of pure gold.
Termites
The tree the storm
broke was full of termites
so we ran to the west
for we had no sun
to know where we were
or when
press a single leaf to
another leaf
or a palm in the frond
of your hand
extend the thumb and
spread the leaves
see what happens
somewhere a
leaf leaves a lake