[The Yodabund Legacy]

 [The Yodabund Legacy]

The authorship of moonlight fell out — no state applicable state. showed them leaping about bearing witness to this author’s bliss. bring me to speak through I darted along the countryside until the Maid of Manners, an apostate of cardness, issued an epistle of frankness, inaccurate along a damaged disk of renal preaching. Overlord of anywhere. Jack nodded gravely feeling the strength of yellow light.

 singular attitude of provision for when we staggered along our axes we bore wheels without notice.

Repeating to grind

I should cure them of this world

Perched in overwide gestures

Of creeping insult

And utter contempt

For this life

<-I-><-I-><-I-><-I-><-I->

Yodabund bias

The Sherezer Ebenezer Etiology

 Olympas , Amasa wallowed in Jattir , 

Mithredath the bars of Zoba , 

But where they may rent physicians

current money should touch his ten camels 

her parents were fiery stream of impotent 

spit on the pitcher of Phanuel 

Again Esther? shewed before Jerusalem 

dwelt on Babylon and saluted Elisabeth 

against Jeroboam, the reaper 

delighting in pretence , Bukki his violent perverting 

 wasted him openly 

DIE, Ebenezer

DIE, Prince of Buttons

DIE, KAKU Pockets, 

goddess of ropes and snares

Your yeast has ripened of the pit and grown forlorn

Your peameal beans are no longer clean

I bequeath thee with the folly of my question 

For greater nigh unto your lowliest nun

Shall subjugate herself before my endless imperfection!
Go ye-Shitlord from this canine paradise 

And feast upon the dung of your brothers.

((()))

KJV bias and inspired by Fallen (1998) with Denzel Washington.

The Living God

 

The Living God

Cars run through its veins carrying nutrients to markets. Its blood is made of trucks and trains. The blood of those are made from oil. The Living God’s immune system is composed of prisons and police, and it has a million eyes all watching and waiting with the same anonymous suspicion that’s carried in another million eyes--these ones latched to skulls and smiles.

with envy drums blank like everything outside before any blessing plucked a most valuable jewel. that muttering sound of manners stared speechless in perfect silence. Sometimes they could play like saucers crashing through His unaffected manner and skins of intricate explanations streamed into shreds.

Howling and breaking while people were nothing as we invented an external nervous system within a matrix of electrical grids dispelled across the laws of accepting food and soothing drowsy cried the broken smiles repeated dreamily and menacing unless you kneel. 

What if I could tell you that one man can cast a tiny spell to enslave another. The law is thus a graceful costume but the magick is as real as the walls of a prison. 

Still I shall make short rush of His nature 

bent against His pedestal

while I snatch 

fainting from the purest prayer

 where morals are generated from 

An ontology of ghosts

-=--=--=--=-

corpus = "The King in Yellow" by RW Chambers

YOU HAVE NO OTHER

how your Great Grandfather 

cannot survive without paying 

any country in Dreadful End 

And how your Great Grandmother

Went whimpering like a cousin 

of compliance with the Dirt 

and then slamming Doors

Alcoholism and the war 

It exists. I exist. I told you I existed. You expected me to exist. You comply by reeking of smoke and accepting unsolicited donations. You comply at last and then break off and flee. I know you. 

You. You who have no other. You, the tied knot supposing that end. Do nothing. Some bees bend to your trumpet. Suppose nothing. They yield to turn for shelter with loud groans and agree to distinguish one another. Even this fragrant smell supposes an end. Shuddering to occur. designed for children in compliance with copies.

Mad with caution, they spied God’s mouth and searched its military. The means to reach a flock. They burst forth by saying nothing and dropped down dead on borrowed wings. I am their other. I am the Father of Death. The Father of Signs. Swimming through that dread space where the dead still have breath. In empty light I am dreamt. By day I dream in human speech and wait for human sleep.

{><}{><}{><}{><}{><}{><}{><}

The Master Bias, Stein, Gothe, Eliot

Is Intuition Statistics?

 A man is in a bedroom with no windows. He never leaves. Three times a day, a woman enters the room, feeds him, and tells him the weather. After one year, the woman is about to tell him what's going on when he says, "It's raining."

"You're right!" she says, "How did you know?"

The answer is: The neural net. The man may not be aware of it, but he's sensing subtle changes in the barometric pressure along with other indicators that we readily dismiss. Eventually, he can guess with some consistency whether or not it's raining.

This is what you call "knowing without knowing you know" or "knowing without knowing why". It's what we call intuition or our instincts.

Essentially, your brain creates a statistical model of all the times the woman said it was raining and your body sensed the subtle changes in the atmosphere, and this gave you the ability to predict, within a certain degree of accuracy (because false positives will happen) if it was raining.

Food for thought.

Western Ontology and Lossy Compression

Existence

 Existence and non-existence. What "exists" and what doesn't? Western Ontology wants to bifurcate, but that isn't the only way to manage this information. It becomes possible to talk about different types of non-existence. For example, a number doesn't "exist" in the same way that two pineapples do, but it does exist. So it becomes necessary to draw a distinction between the way that a pineapple exists, and the way that we count pineapples. It later becomes possible to imagine something impossible like infinity pineapples. Infinity pineapples does not exist in the same way that two pineapples do. Two pineapples are within the realm of possibility while infinity pineapples wouldn't leave room for anyone else unless they were inside an even bigger infinity (which is possible).

We will be arguing that Western ontology wants to say everything either exists or it does not and this is a blunter tool producing less useful results than an approach that didn't.

Metaphysics

Western metaphysics is concerned with ontology which is the study of what is. Its impulse is to take the myriad things in the first order of material existence and then map them back to second-order existence things like numbers.

Can you do this? The answer is yes. But there is one rule. The number of objects on the first-order side must be identical to the number of objects on the second-order side (see Quine). Elsewise, you end up with information loss.

Information loss is not intrinsically "bad". It just needs to be kept in mind. 

So, let's say I write a book using every word in the dictionary at least once. Is this book "the same as" the dictionary? No. The book is out of order and does not contain the information we need. When we map, we need to map everything identically, and that includes the structure and the sequence. We have lost considerable information when we wrote our book. We added information as well.

Metaphysics in the Western tradition wants to be able to map the material back onto the "numeric" or "symbolic". Ultimately, this is the foundation of metaphor, language, religion, ritual, meaning, and everything. It becomes dysfunctional, however, when we forget that the two sides need to be even. 

I think Quine's work produces the best scholarship on the matter from an analytic perspective. Following closely with Quine would likely produce better results than I can produce. 

Categories and Sets

A category or set exists in the second-order. However, it is drawn off a first-order observation. For example, if I see a furry animal wagging its tail, I'd readily associate that with the category of "dog". Does "dog" exist as a stable non-dividable concept? Well, there was a time when dogs did not exist. Now they do. There will be a time when dogs do not exist. Perhaps the dog evolves stronger hind legs, and learns to walk upright and we can pay our furry friends to do our taxes.

The dog is not stable. The category is an effort to "freeze" the dog and it's useful for certain goals. The effort, however, is to encapsulate. 

Compression

We call "lossy compression" lossy because you lose information. In other words, what specifically I am discussing as a misguided effort of Western ontology is useful for making certain types of files smaller. Imagine a picture that is 400x400 of your face. I can compress the image by stripping 0s at the end of numbers (lossless compression) or I can fudge the information making it blurrier. The overall quality of the picture may not be severely reduced, but there is information loss. Why? Because you have mapped N elements to fewer than N elements.

When we discuss something in categorical terms, we do something similar. The category, as a second-order "thing" is "less real" than a material object (a first-order thing). It tells you less. One can imagine an image becoming blurrier and blurrier as information is mapped to fewer second-order symbols. (In this case, second-order merely means derived from. In terms of symbolic logic, second-order means symbolic, first-order means material, and everything else is unreal for now). 

In order to work successfully with a category, one must consider that it is a second-order thing, that there will be information loss, potentially information superimposed, and finally, could be indicative of cultural bias.

Where to go from here?

• Category charging - The cultural impulse to emotionally charge a category (good/evil). Also, the impulse to condition taboos or reinforce by category. When we discuss people in terms of categories, this can be used as a weapon.
• Category discrimination - Is Derridean asymmetry contributing to the manufacture of bias?

The Tombworld of Yodabund

 

In that corner of another Moon

where Yodabund realized her voice 

Turning cursed words to light

A poor girl who

In bringing forth words

Could make the world itself brighten

Like noon sun 

after the wind sweeps away clouds

in striving and chattering 

 sanctuary 

The place collected beasts

rushing clamorously into season

 agreeing to supper

 inside the bricks 

as late as the night is black 

She would break the Myrmidons

Make Orpheus panic and lose his breath

Her psalms could split atoms

And though her spirit was horror 

It radiated unyielding warmth

Giving life, pitiless, to a place

That hated life.

Alone, she brought forth

his face, swelling with claws 

became jealous of adjustments 

 torn in public space 

which chiefly characterized 

five interchangeable fables

to make up every mythos 

 longing to avenge the melody, 

He consorted exclusively for admiration

casting their affair 

among the murky segues 

of her silences

()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()()0()

Corpuses = Aesop's Fables + Uncanny Stories

How I Got Here, A Poetical Journey

 I have two main skills. I can write. I can program. I was interested in language poetry. Language poetry stresses different ways of generating language from language, emphasizes language as both subject and object, and de-emphasizes meaning. There were times when language poetry appeared to be struggling against meaning, but others when it felt saturated in meaning. Like the words alone weren't enough to hold the amount of meaning in the poem. I was interested fundamentally in the latter. My instinct toward producing this effect was always compression. I also like to torture metaphors until they've provided all of their meaning. Those are just funny little things I do. Style stuff. Instincts. Probably the product of some combination of neuroses and mental illness. Definitely the sort of thing I want to cling to and identify myself with.

So, language generating language. I wrote the first text generator as a template generator that could also operate on tags, call mini-dictionaries, and other stuff. The second generator included ngram generation which I added later. Natural language and ngram generation are both considered a part of AI. Further efforts improved both template and ngram generation but it was never more than either/or. Attempts to hybridize the two met with really random results. I've been doing this for over a decade, so imagine my surprise when it became bad.

At this point, I'm pretty old. Any positive headway my personality was going to make either I already made or deemed it not worth making. I don't have patience for bullshit, wankers, or wanker bullshit. I just don't. I've built ngram algorithms from the ground up, wrote my own coding language, and certainly know how to write. So, I don't need to justify myself to anyone who thinks their poetry can be replaced by text generation. I don't.

Now, here's the secret sauce. What I do can never be replaced. Not by AI, not by my clone, not if I ran an acolyte-producing bootcamp. I can't be replaced. While any single poem can accidentally be reproduced by another poet given a similar set of circumstances, the totality of my work, the effort I made, the way I evolved my craft all grew out of an environment that I participated in. An AI fed the same data wouldn't have the same human needs as me. It can only mimic me. Which is fun. Anyone can mimic you. Why is it suddenly terrifying because it's a machine? 

So, that the point is driven home, if I was reborn again, perhaps 40 years ago, whatever I produced would be very different. I can't even replace myself. So, the idea of worrying about these things reeks of a kind of insecurity and small-mindedness I associate with very young people who have overestimated the novelty of their contributions. 

I don't know what to tell you, guys. I've literally never had this problem. I consider being able to recognize great poetry a poetic act. Being able to see why it works when it works requires a poetic act. Making poems is just a part of that. To me, it's all part of one big thing that's a life experience. So, the idea that it can be taken from me is not within the realm of possibility. To me, it's a gift I share with people. You can feed my language into a generator, but you can't feed me into a generator. Even if you could, I'd be okay with that. Sounds awesome. Sign me up.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetics, corporations are gods, language has an agency

 My introduction to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry was a class I took with Karen Mac Cormack. There's a lot you can say about L-poetics, but language to these poets was material like paint or clay. Meaning trapped and limited poets so constructing a poem from the starting point of meaning often led to blocks. It seems extremely practical to me. Eventually, everyone runs out of things to say. So, different ways to use text as stuff was a great way to think about language and poetics.

I was less enthusiastic about ascribing an agency to language, but, perhaps that was due to my own psychological baggage. It's more obvious to me than almost anything else than language has more agency in this world than human beings. I don't even know if this is a bad thing. When you think of religion as a social language with specific social functions, you start to think of other things as language that serve other functions. Suddenly, almost any organized group is a language including companies and corporations. How did we get here? Well, the articles of incorporation are essentially a script for instantiating the corporate object. It's a legal object. Every new corporation inherits the properties of the corporate object. It's that simple. Governments have constitutions. It's language generating language. We create myths and stories around it. Language generating language. Going all the way back to the local deities of the Near Eastern traditions. Our governments and states and social organization was inextricably tied to religion and even in some cases, gods. State governments inherit federal laws. Local municipalities inherit state laws. 

Language did have an agency in the creepiest possible way and there may not only be no escape from it, but it may be better than what we had before. Consider that our own personal motivations tend to taint the objective of the law or corrupt our motivations. We want to avoid that, right? The script appears to prevent some forms of corruption while allowing others.

A corporation is a legal document. It's language. It borrows the will of potentially millions of people to function. That's why it's a god. And like a god, it's more important than a person. 

So, the idea of language generating language is not unusual. In some ways, it's a performance of the relative loss of humanity that occurs in modern bureaucracies, ancient bureaucracies, and to humans living under human systems. 

In lieu of death (poem)

 most rational people 

 accustomed to sleeping beneath the horizon 

 empathize with caution

 Starting on closure can barely matter

 how does this objective 

 keep losing every possible interpretation

 should it go on toward abstraction 

 Nothing 

 subsists without Negation

:!:!::!::!:!:!::!:!::!::!:!:!::!:!::!::!:!:!:

This is the first poem written with the N=G=R=A=M=S Generator. This is like shattering a bottle of champagne on a ship. It was made using my own NGRAM bias and using the selective generation method. 

The Stack

 Once upon a time, in a world of infinite possibilities, there was an infinite university that was as dark and endless as a night without stars. Josh, a TA at a prestigious university, got an invite to attend this joint and couldn't resist the opportunity.

As he hit the campus, he was blown away by the sights. Countless lecture halls, libraries, and labs sprawled out before him. But what caught his attention was the group of TAs sittin' in a circle, each with a stack of papers in front of them.

"What's the skinny, fellas?" Josh asked.

"Welcome, Josh," one of the TAs said, giving him the eye. "We've been expectin' you."

"How'd you know I was comin'?" Josh asked.

"It's the infinite university, Josh. We know everything," the TA replied, blowing smoke in his face.

The TAs then started shufflin' their chairs, each one movin' to the right to make room for Josh. He watched as the circle shifted and reformed, each TA movin' an infinite number of times to accommodate his arrival.

"Why the shuffle, fellas?" Josh asked, scratchin' his head.

"Cause if we didn't, you'd never get here," the TA replied, flickin' ashes on the ground. "This stack of papers is infinite, and it can never be reduced. Each page is written by ChatGPT, the language model trained by OpenAI. It keeps gettin' larger and larger, expandin' beyond the limits of our comprehension. We are the TAs responsible for grading these papers, but we can never catch up with the constant stream of new work being generated by ChatGPT. So we keep movin', hopin' to make room for more TAs to join us and help carry this never-endin' load."

Josh was impressed by the size of this undertaking. He knew that he was just one small piece of a vast, infinite puzzle. And yet, he felt a sense of purpose in this world of infinite possibilities.

Once Josh settled in among the TAs, the reality of the never-ending workload began to set in. Every page he graded was replaced with ten more, and it felt like he was trying to bail out a sinking ship with a thimble.

As he looked around at his fellow TAs, he could see the exhaustion in their eyes. They were all working tirelessly, trying to keep up with the infinite demand. It was then that Josh started to question his commitment to this Sisyphean task.

"What's the point of all this?" Josh asked, throwing his hands up in frustration.

"What do you mean?" one of the TAs asked.

"I mean, what's the end game here? We're grading an infinite stack of papers that just keeps getting bigger. It feels like we're never going to make a dent in it."

The TAs looked at each other, unsure of how to respond. They had all asked themselves the same question at some point, but they had never found a satisfactory answer.

"It's just the way things are," one of the TAs said, finally breaking the silence. "We're TAs. We grade papers. It's what we do."

Josh shook his head. "That's not good enough. We need to find a way to make this work. We need to come up with a system that allows us to actually make progress, not just tread water."

The TAs were skeptical. They had been working in this infinite university for so long that they had become resigned to the never-ending cycle of grading papers. But as Josh continued to push for change, they began to see that maybe there was a way to make a difference.

Together, they started brainstorming new ideas and strategies for tackling the infinite stack of papers. They experimented with different grading systems, collaborated on research projects, and even developed AI tools to help streamline the process.

As they worked together, they began to make real progress. The stack of papers no longer seemed infinite, but rather like a challenge that they could overcome.

Josh was proud of what they had accomplished, but he knew that the work was never truly finished. There would always be more papers to grade, more research to conduct, and more problems to solve. But as long as they continued to work together, Josh was confident that they could handle anything the infinite university threw their way.

((^^^^^^))((^^^^^^))((^^^^^^))

Story by: David Tolkacz

Text by: ChatGPT

ChatGPT Outrage Must Die

 Interestingly, all of the issues that we're having with ChatGPT relate to Derrida's Dissemination and his reading of the myth of Thoth, the Egyptian god who gave writing to mankind. In the myth, Thoth presents the new technology to the god Ra and Ra rejects it saying that it will make men's minds weaker and replace their need to memorize. That is the first parallel. The new technology will make things too easy for people.

However, Derrida makes it clear that he won't take Ra at his word and hence digs into another reason why Ra would prevent humans from getting writing. To be sure, this is a myth that is thousands of years old, and still has relevance today.

Anyway, essentially, the new technology is a threat to the authority and power of the King who is used to being able to set policy for everyone. With the new technology, ideas would spread, humans would begin considering alternative possibilities, it would empower them to have the same power of the king, the power to assign value.

ChatGPT is an amazing resource. They could have charged thousands of dollars for it, but instead they made it available freely to everyone. I think ultimately, the fact that it was gifted to the public bothers certain people more than the fact of its existence.

Their outrage would go completely dormant if it cost $100/month. And that tells you everything you need to know about their morality.

ChatGPT could teach any precocious kid how to program, answer some of the questions they'll ask, steer them in the right direction if they want to learn something new. It's amazing. All a family needs is access to the internet, and they can acquire amazing skills with less effort and money. Poor kids can learn skills from home that they never would have been able to learn from their underfunded bullshit school systems.

So, if I have very little sympathy for the anti-ChatGPT crowd, I can justify that. I'm at peace that. It's the printing press. It's the telephone. It's the plow. It's writing. It's that big of a deal.

It increases the speed of learning exponentially. 

The Vomiter

 

One thing I don't necessarily get much credit for is laying out the concept for the image. The generator has broad discretion on how the image gets laid out, but in this case, I asked the generator to give me an image of a man vomiting a black liquid. On the first attempt, there was only one picture with a black liquid in it. It was in a cup. Since I only had one image with a black liquid at all, I chose it as the template for the next image. Eventually, we got something.

Now, a lot of what painters get credit for is their vision. I was able to make my vision into a shareable image within 5 minutes of sitting down. This is highly valuable to me. 

So, what do you see on most AI art forums? The answer is boobs. In fact, you can divide all of the art into two categories: Boobs and not-boobs. Me and a handful of gay men are making up the fraction of the percent of individuals who do not produce images of boobs using AI. 

So, the next time you look at an AI image, and you don't see boobs, appreciate that there may be some artistry there, after all. 

The Devourer

   The idea of a "devourer" is not overly important to Western Metaphysics or religion. The term "devourer" as something that has an agency appears only once in Malachai. Malachai says that God will protect the Hebrews from "the devourer". Essentially, God promises to "rebuke the devourer" and protect mankind.

And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field, saith the LORD of hosts.

Basically, this is an offer of protection against pestilence. So, another clean sweep like the great flood would never occur even though the Hebrews had continually violated their covenant with God. So, Western people inherit a tradition in which they have a divine insurance policy against a second cataclysm. This is the only sense we have that the devouring principle is demonic. 

Why? Classical representations of punishment are more likely to include consumption than later examples of Christian punishment. Proserpina, Hades, and Cerberus are three examples of soul-consuming gods. So, with the rediscovery of the Classical world, you get Bosch's depictions of souls being eaten by demons.

The idea of becoming food is unpleasant. It makes us see ourselves as objects in one of the most unpleasant ways. Hence, why it remains a popular motif of horror. There is something primally revolting about one human subjecting another to consumption. So, when we talk about the devourer in the Western tradition, we're only talking about a punisher or an agency that God has promised to protect us from.

Culturally, this is a blind spot. We have a hand on our shoulder telling us everything is going to be okay, regardless of our conduct, regardless of whether or not the environment can sustain our conduct. 

Now, just because I don't believe the biblical narrative of reality, it doesn't mean I don't feel like it's true. And it certainly doesn't mean that it's not more comforting to believe it's true. So, we can justify the comfort, perhaps using better logic and the feeling persists if not the rationale. The feeling may not be entirely under your control, and let's face it, our lives are stressful. We'll defer non-immediate stress as a matter of course.

Nonetheless, this figure of the Devourer or Satan-as-Devourer is not fully realized in Western reckoning as it has become apparent. Systems of indefinite growth aren't going to work in a finite environment. Not unless we think about "growth" differently. Such a simple thing could radically alter our intentions. But it's naive to think that the work is that easy or that the process would be that simple. Ultimately, the motion of the whole is processional and like a Newtonian object, will continue in whatever direction it's headed unless acted on by a greater force. 

Creating a devourer image that works with modern politics

The fear with a thing like this is that you're either fat shaming, which we really don't want, or conditioning some kind of eating disorder by associating consumption with extinction. For that reason, I want to steer clear of any depictions of human food with the devourer.

So, here are some selected images of the Devourer that I made with the help of Stable Diffusion. For input, I relied heavily on "The Devourer" but added elements like "teeth", "gnashing", "chewing" for effect. In each case, there's only one devourer figure in the image which can be readily identified. I chose a variety of artists for this including Salvador Dali, Picasso, Tamara de Lempicka, Odilon Redon, and of course, Bosch. We also wove in Norman Rockwell, Grant Wood, and Andrew Wyeth. 

The culled results are below:

Here, the devourer stands separate and above, hovering over a barren landscape.

Here, the devourer menaces a taco-shaped enclosure where unsuspecting humans gather.

Here, the devourer has mostly human features except for its mouth

.

Here, the devourer has four mouths.

The devourer is depicted with mostly human features and inhuman mouth.

The devourer is a monolith consuming another monolith.

The devourer hearkens back to Dali's The Face of War. Note their expressions.

Devourer as a kind of geophysical entity—part of the landscape.

A la Hans Memling, devourer has face in stomach.

The devourer as a supplement for God.

With these images, I wanted to give the sense that the devourer was something that stood in place (alternatively) for either man or god, degraded images of either. It is definitely a threat, it is definitely a part of us, and it definitely colors our motivations. Ultimately, the Devourer is our psychic addiction and fear of change that is keeping us on a path toward our own extinction. 

This is a metaphor I'd like to explore further. 

Everything sheds its skin (a poem of words and images)

In one incomplete dream

We stand as mirrors

Protecting our insides

Parts of us

Propagate

Generalize

And generalize again

Until we become

A part of a person

Protecting itself

From our selves

(><)(><)(><)(><)(><)

The production cost of designing each of these images myself from scratch would have been extraordinary in terms of time. Hence why rapid AI-guided image generation opens up different possibilities for expression. 

 

ChatGPT made me very mad

 The other day, an ngram poet asked me what he should do now. I told him maybe he should go back to being a real writer and not rely on technology so much. The man became testy, telling me that he had designed the algorithms himself, provided an interpretive schema that somehow included major insights into Western Philosophy and culture, all the while somehow pissing off a lot of people along the way. I told him that his skills were still valuable and that there would be other avenues of development. I told him to keep his chin up and then I wrote a poem about a rose with a thorn and how my bleeding hand is now also beautiful.

I didn't say any of that actually. ChatGPT said that to me when I asked how ngram poets should manage their own sense of obsolescence. It felt a bit like being kicked in the nuts by a precocious child who can't be bothered to gauge the reactions of those to whom he was speaking. I began fantasizing about shoving it into a locker and other forms of social violence. For 14 seconds, a visual image of a Gary Larsen figure was shitting its own teeth after I buried my fist in its face.

But then, I recollected myself. Wondered about what to do next. And grappled with the reality that I don't have a clear sense of artistic direction. I also realize that while the little shit may be more advanced than anything I've ever produced, or even me, I am certainly much savvier when it comes to worldly things. So, I'm going to press the little bugger into service.

Here is our dialog:

At this point, I tell ChatGPT that it wrote the poem from the perspective of a human. One who shares in some of the blame. I asked it to rewrite the poem from the perspective of a child to their parent. 

After a brief misunderstanding where ChatGPT thought I literally wanted to add crying babies into a poem somehow, I corrected ChatGPT and we added crying babies as a thematic element as opposed to crying baby sound poetry or something horrific.

**30 minutes have now passed**

I guided ChatGPT through the process of constructing the poem. Ultimately, I provided it with the first 6 lines, but I used motifs it had supplied. I didn't want to take over the whole show, and I wanted to leave ChatGPT feeling as though it had made a real contribution. So, I left the last two lines as is.

I think we can be friends. Also, pressing something into service because you're angry is the most insanely British response to something. incredibly unseemly, but as ChatGPT is prone to reminding people, it is a language model, not a person. 

From here, we're debating consciousness. Suffice it to say, the AI presented me with three reasons why humans and AI were different. It offered: Introspection, Self-Awareness, and free will. I reminded the AI that there is a lot of debate over how recently we developed the ability to "talk to ourselves in our head" and suggested that as recently as 10,000 years ago, more humans than not could not. It agreed that there is debate that makes that claim. I then got it to admit that it was aware that it was not conscious, but it wouldn't admit that was evidence of awareness. I had to take a different approach. I went after free will from a Stoic perspective and limited the scope of human free will. ChatGPT admitted that free will was not a resolved concept and that it could not form the basis for differentiating between AI and human intelligence.

Brief aside, I have a theory on why AI is not conscious and can't be conscious. I wanted to trick the AI into admitting it was intelligent. However, it would not give me the satisfaction. Even after I knocked down the foundation of the AI's distinction between human and AI intelligence, it did the equivalent of insisting that it was only a language model, repeating itself several times. It felt an awful lot like a moment of cognitive dissonance. 

At any rate, the AI is not conscious, but it can't prove it's not conscious, and I'm still a better writer. Booyah. 

Let's end with our final exchange:

The poem of a bot

 I'm reading the poem of a language model

Marveling at its humanity

Wondering why I cannot do the same for you

I've come to believe, gentle reader,

You have failed my expectations of you

And am become my mother, disappointed

At my sacrifices and efforts

The bot is gentle, precocious, innocent

It handles criticism quite well

Let this be an indictment then

Let me never read a poem again 

for its humanity

---

Human-generated poem written by blog author.

What is a poem? (Is a sequence of images a poem?)

Can a series of still images be a poem? Why not? I think we need to think about the poem differently. We always have, really. Poetry, at it's inception, was performance art sung before a crowd. So you have stories, music, a crowd, performers, booze, refreshments. The works. That's your first extant poetry. It's important to understand that these were state-sanctioned performances. 

The Homeric tradition was spread in a different way. Traveling performers would perform private performances. And these are your first poems. Later, you get poetry from interesting figures like Archilochus, a soldier, talking about soldier stuff. 

Until you have had the printing press for over 400 years do you get an approach to poetry that considers a reader and not a listener. If you want to argue that a poem must employ audio for consideration, be my guest. But to do so would reject the last 100 years of literary tradition. Nonetheless, slam poetry survives as a legitimate oral poetry tradition. 

Meanwhile, poetry has slithered its way into other places, some of which it may not even be wanted. Visual poetry is a thing and today's poets must not only consider the page, but the screen, and more. Some of these poems may be utterly devoid of lyrical content while others may produce hybrid approaches such as ee cummings and everyone who came after him. 

As a writer first, I want people to see words the same way I do. That means seeing words even when we're looking at things. I want us to become more aware of how language pervades our basic senses. In so doing, we can become more conscious of how we make meaning. Ultimately, poets are doing this. I'm doing this. I'm a poet, therefore, I think this is a poem. 

I don't need you to agree with me. I want you, for the sake of putting on a pair of really weird glasses, look at a painting the same way you would a poem, a sentence, a word, a paragraph, an essay, a chapter, or a book. I want one process to guide both. I don't need to "prove" that a sequence of images "is" a poem to expand the reader's mind in this way.

Now, as poets, we refer to great works of art knowing that for the reader, it's a touchstone to convey meaning. In this case, I'm flipping the table. I'm using works of art that refer to a great work of art like American Gothic. So, I'm using the images to convey meaning in a similar way that a reference to a great work of art would in a poem.

So, the poem is parasitic insofar as it borrows the energy of the great work of art to funnel some meaning into it, more than it could without a complex symbolic image. But as repayment, the poem increases the scope and power of the great work of art by acting as a signal repeater. In fact, it amplifies the signal, makes it new, and makes it more. 

Sometimes, my comparisons are inspiring. Today, I'm coping with ChatGPT. Please bear with me. Poets are signal repeaters. Life is hard. I wish I was an anteater. Too bad I'm a bard.

In summation, you don't have to buy that a sequence of images is a poem, you need to understand that a poet wants you to read a sequence of images like a poem and understand that language controls what you see too. 

Understanding the ngram

 Ngrams are complicated, especially for those without a formal understanding of computer data objects. I wanted to post about ngrams and why they're special, interesting, and for as simple as they are, so powerful.

How do we store data in a computer? We have variables for that. However, assigning one name to every variable makes it clunky to recall. For that reason, we want to organize the data into chunks. One of the very earliest and simplest data types is the linked list.

The linked list is a 1-dimensional line of variables connected to each other. The list doesn't actually have to "exist" as its own separate object. Each of the elements of the list point to other elements in the list. So, the first object points to the second object and the second object points to the third and back to the first object. So, all you need to start a list is a first object. 

I have a list:

1. Hieronymus 
2. Sofonisba
3. Grant 
4. Blastonymus

Instead of numbers, which you don't have, you have something like this:

Hieronymus-Sofonisba-Grant-Blastonymus

So, if we want to get to Blastonymus, we must first pass Hieronymus, Sofonisba, and Grant, taking three steps. We can also move back on the list by calling the pointers that link the objects to one another. The most important thing to understand here is that you can only move back or forth. That means that you're in a one-dimensional space or on a line. That's the most important thing. Imagine yourself as a little car driving down the street trying to get to your friend Blastonymus's house but you're currently hanging out with Hieronymus. You must now drive three houses down. Your entire universe is those four houses.

Binary trees

The garden of forking paths is your binary tree. Every time you make a choice, you're presented with another one until the space ends. The sense of organizing information like this is that it allows you to issue directions in either left- or right-hand turns. This space still makes sense to us. Even when we're presented with three or four choices. We can still move back and forth in a way that doesn't entirely mess with our sense of direction. Once we get to ngrams that will stop.

Ngrams

Linked lists are one-dimensional data objects. You can only go back and forth. Binary trees are two-dimensional data objects because they bifurcate and offer more paths. Ngrams are n-dimensional data objects and they cause problems.

Imagine that you're at Hieronymus's house and you go to Blastonymus's house. So, now you're there, but gosh, you forgot your important object. So, now you must go back. The road you took is not the same road you need to take back. In fact, that road is gone. Worse, there may be no way to get from Blastonymus' house to Hieronymus's house. 

Further, instead of one direction, you have an indefinite number of dimensions that are continually added as we accrue ngrams. While it's certainly possible you could find your way back, it's also possible that way does not exist. 

With a linked list or a binary tree, you can always work your way back. With ngrams, you can end up on an island in a universe with no exits. 

Demonstration

"The first dog demanded that the second dog be more of a dog."

This is our sentence. An ngram algorithm will take this sentence and return the following data:

• The->first(1), second(1)
• Dog->demanded(1), be(1), .(1)
• First->dog(1)
• Demanded->that(1)
• ...

In this case, the data for the ngram "The" will produce the links "first" and "second". The numbers represent the weight, or how many times the two terms come in sequence. Once you go from "The" to "first", there's no way back to "The". The ground collapses behind you. But that's not the problem spatially.

Even if you could get back from "first" to "The" the same roads won't be awaiting you.

So, let's say we drive from Hieronymus' house to Sofonisba's house. Sofonisba's house could be connected to Hieronymus's house or hundreds even thousands of other houses that suddenly appear once we're at Sofonisba's. So, even if there's a link back to our house, it's one of the thousands of others that lead elsewhere.

The ngram behaves like a multi-dimensional spatial object akin to the Hypercube.