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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3094 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 10, 2023

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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.

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