“Well done on exploring your artistic side”

image produced by Craiyon

Today’s Daily Create was to pull random words from various radio stations and use them as inspiration for a poem. I didn’t really pay attention and immediately went to the radio.garden site to check out stations around the world, or at least around my corner of the globe. Since I didn’t pay attention, I grabbed sentences rather than individual words:

• Come into my work and I’ll be your server
  from CJIQ, Kitchener, Ontario
• Too bad for the fool-hearted clown!
  from Cuzin Vinny, Milford DE
• Even living for God we go through the motions
  from Plateau Community Radio, Oak Hill WV
• Milk and honey and Captain Crunch and you in the morning
  from CFRY, Portage la Prarie, Manitoba
• My choice is that they matter
  from YPR FM, Bilings MT

Two lines are song lyrics, two are from talk radio and the other was a radio preacher. I left the lines in the order that I found them. There is a sense of poetry within the lines, and a sense of rhythm that almost makes them work together, but I’m not getting any kind of meaning from it. It might help to rearrange some of the lines, and it would definitely help to edit it, using the found lines as a starting place.

I asked Dr. Oblivion for his feedback:

Oh, how wonderful that you created an abstract poem.
It sounds like an interesting collection of random sentences you heard on the radio.
I appreciate your creativity in combining them together.
In poetry, the meaning can often be subjective and reflect what the reader interprets from it.
So it’s up to you what you want to convey with these sentences.
Well done on exploring your artistic side.
If you have any questions related to art, technology, media or artificial intelligence, feel free to ask.

I think I got the good Dr. Oblivion as opposed to the snarky Dr. Oblivion, but I’ve heard from the latter so much that I can’t help but hear snark in his tone. Going a step further, I asked ChatGPT to make a poem using those lines:

In the realm of hustle, where dreams may swerve,
Come into my work, and I’ll be your server.
Too bad for the fool-hearted clown,
Lost in a circus, wearing a painted frown.

Even living for God, we go through the motions,
Seeking divine whispers in life’s vast oceans.
Milk and honey, and Captain Crunch in the morning light,
A sweet symphony, a breakfast delight.

My choice is that they matter, each line, each rhyme,
Echoes of moments frozen in the tapestry of time.
In the choices we make, in the stories we weave,
A reminder that our lives, too, can deceive.

The rhythm and rhyme are better, but I don’t think the poem is actually improved. The problem, I think, is that the artistic intent is missing. The machine can mimic the forms of poetry and string words together in a statistically coherent manner, but it’s not expressing anything. Its output is as devoid of meaning as the input. Any meaning that might be found would be projected my the reader. Which is pretty much what the doctor said.