Recently, I used OpenAI’s GPT-3 DaVinci-003 model to (amongst other silly things) write a limerick about Immanuel Kant:
Old Immanuel Kant at a glance
Was a philosopher whose thought could entrance
He wrote of morality
In a manner quite contrary
To the views that the louts would advance
GPT3 DaVinci-003, generated by CJ Blunt
With OpenAI’s ChatGPT interface for the language model taking off, I wanted to see whether ChatGPT’s tweaked approach would do any better. Certainly, it beats Edward Lear’s dry limericking style.
David Hume:
There once was a Scotsman named Hume
Whose empiricist views caused a fume
He claimed causation
Was mere imagination
And his critics found him dour and gloom.
ChatGPT, generated by CJ Blunt
That worked. But Plato gives ChatGPT a much more difficult problem. It struggled to find rhymes for ‘Plato’ and couldn’t break out of the most generic limerick form (ending the first line with name). It tried a few eye-rhymes and half-rhymes like ‘bravado’, ‘follow’ and ‘go’, before eventually settling for this gem:
There once was a wise man named Plato
Whose ideas were hard to negate-o
He spoke of the Forms
And how the mind transforms
And his influence we can still appreciate-o
ChatGPT, generated by CJ Blunt