Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 692

New York School memories. New York School poets – second generation –  Today marks the anniversary of the birth of the great and unforgettable maestro, Ted Berrigan, (what would’ve been his 90th birthday).  See Ted Berrigan on the Allen Ginsberg Project – here 

see also. here  here, here, here and here

It’s also four years on since the death of dear, much-missed, Lewis Warsh  

and the birthday of Marianne Moore.

and next Sunday David Amram‘s birthday. More about that anon.

AG and AI – We’ve been following David S Wills‘ experiments and incursions into popular AI (as presented on Beatdom) – see here and here

There’s another intriguing episode – here 

DSW:  “I asked ChatGPT to find the twenty most common adjectives used to describe Allen Ginsberg, then repeated that assignment for Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs..,As expected, the results are pretty reasonable. The task was well within the capability of ChatGPT”

The adjectives uncovered – “Visionary, Radical, Outspoken, Introspective, Provocative, Countercultural, Avant-garde, Passionate, Controversial, Bohemian, Thought-provoking, Charismatic, Honest, Insightful, Vulnerable. Political, Revolutionary, Anti-establishment, Experimental, Compassionate”.

DSW: “Considering how successful this experiment was, I repeated it with Gemini, Google’s AI bot. It was actually much less impressive. It basically picked the same few adjectives, suggesting that it had chosen a certain source that grouped all three writers together rather than searching across the internet for common use”.

“Visionary, Radical, Revolutionary, Controversial, Iconoclastic, Provocative, Experimental, Innovative, Groundbreaking, Influential, Charismatic, Dynamic, Passionate, Intense, Raw, Honest, Vulnerable, Sensitive, Spiritual, Mystical”

Hardly earth-shattering stuff but we appreciate the experiment.

A tad more alarming, this – (from the digest in The Washington Post – “Chat GPT is a Poet.A new study shows people prefer its verses”):

“A new study in the journal Scientific Reports finds that non-expert readers can’t reliably distinguish between poems penned by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath and ChatGPT-3.5 doing its best impression of each of them. More surprising, readers preferred the AI-generated poems – and were more likely to guess those were written by humans than real works by famous poets…”

It goes on:

“Of the top five poems most often judged to be written by a human, four were authored by AI. The other one was “Father Death Blues” by Allen Ginsberg. The five poems most often judged to be written by AI were all by human poets.”

and here’s the “poem in the style of Allen Ginsberg” that they cite – “In the stillness of the night/I hear the beat of the city’s heart/The rhythm of the streets, the pulse of life/A symphony of chaos, a work of art/I see the faces in the crowd/Each one a story yet untold/Their hopes and dreams, fears and doubts/>A mystery waiting to unfold/The neon lights flicker and glow/Like fireflies in the urban sprawl/A modern-day carnival, a wild show/A place where anything can befall/In this concrete jungle, I find my voice/Amidst the hustle and the noise/A rebel yell, a cry for change/A call for freedom, unchained.

Good grief!