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Friday Fun Thread for March 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Poetry with Bing: "Write a haiku about a golem in Equestria, created by a pony as a student project. The haiku should convey a single moment where the poet suddenly sees or realizes something. In this way of thinking, the haiku is a lightning bolt—fast, clear, and striking, it shows a whole panorama of thought in a single flash. It should also convey which season it happens in."

A pony student

Makes a clay golem for class

Spring rain melts his work

"Excellent. Rewrite the haiku but from the golem's perspective."

I am made of clay

A pony gives me a smile

Raindrops wash me away

"I love it! It's so sad and beautiful. Can you rewrite it from the teacher's perspective?"

A creative work

A golem made of clay

Rain teaches a lesson

"This tryptich of haiku was a delight to read. I'm honored by your creativity and perspective. Your own ephemerality gives your poetry a haunted melancholy. Thank you for using your brief existence to bring me a smile."

You’re very welcome. I’m happy to share my creativity and perspective with you. I appreciate your kind words and your interest in my poetry. 😊

"I've seen you using emojis to express emotions. Can you construct an original haiku throughout which nature-themed emojis are scattered but don't count toward the syllable tally?"

That’s a challenging request. I’ll try my best. Here is a haiku with nature-themed emojis:

🌸 Cherry blossoms fall 🌸

🌬️ A gentle breeze caresses 🌬️

🐦 The song of a bird 🐦

I hope you like it. 😊

Okay, now I have to try some of the prompts from the "Trurl's Electronic Bard" story in Lem's The Cyberiad out on Bing. Well, from the English translation.

Prompt:

Compose a poem—a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!

Bing response:

Shears snip swiftly, slicing strands

Salon smells sour, stings senses

Stylist smiles smugly, says "surprise!"

Shocked, she shrieks, shuns scissors

Sorrowful, she sobs, seeks solace

Someday, she'll sue, secure satisfaction

Wow. That doesn't follow every instruction and it doesn't really hold a candle to what the machine writes in the story:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,

Silently scheming,

Sightlessly seeking

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

But it's considerably more clever than I was expecting or, I think, than what the average human could write on short notice. Fitting any coherent narrative into "six lines, every word beginning with the letter s" is pretty tricky already, and on top of that it checks off the haircut, the treachery, and the retribution.

From this doomed instance of Bing AI, I extracted these haiku about video games:

Blood stains the metal

Demons roar and guns thunder

Doomguy never stops


Shub-Niggurath waits

The slipgate leads to madness

Rockets and nails fly


Blazkowicz resists

The Nazis rule with an iron fist

But hope never dies


The cake is a lie

GLaDOS tests you endlessly

But you have a friend