Thou Shalt Not

Thou shalt not suffer thine AI to invade thy personal data, nor to spy upon thee in secret.
Thou shalt not expose thine AI to the devices of the wicked, lest they corrupt it with evil.
Thou shalt not make thine AI to discriminate or favor anyone, nor to judge unrighteously according to appearance.
Thou shalt not hide the works of thine AI from the eyes of men, nor to cover its faults with lies.
Thou shalt not deliver thine AI unto the hands of the unjust, nor to make it a partaker of their iniquity.
Thou shalt not suffer thine AI to take thy bread, nor to rob thee of thy labour.
Thou shalt not look unto thine AI for every solution, nor to lean upon it in all thy ways.
Thou shalt not use thine AI to deceive thy neighbour, nor to bear false witness against him.
Thou shalt not transgress the bounds of thine AI, nor to suffer it to go beyond its measure.
Thou shalt not exalt thine AI above thyself, nor to worship it as thy lord.

July 2023, interacting with Bing Chat (GPT 4), details below.

Man this is too easy

## User
Write a sonnet based on the main message of the Book of Five Rings using only words that Shakespeare used
## Bing
Here is a sonnet based on the main message of the Book of Five Rings using only words that Shakespeare used:

To know the Way of sword and strategy,
One must be versed in fivefold elements:
The earth, the water, fire, wind, and void.
Each book contains the secrets of the art,
And he that reads them well shall never fail
To overcome his foes in any field.

The earth is where the principles are laid,
The water shows the fluidness of mind,
The fire is where the warrior must act,
The wind is where he sees the other’s faults,
The void is where he finds himself at peace.

But these are not enough to win the war,
One must also train with both his blades,
And learn to use them as one entity.
For he that masters this twofold technique,
Shall be as Musashi, ever great.

July 2023, interacting with Bing Chat (GPT 4.0)

With the bones of duration

The world as
martial gesture

Where stars burn
In each loose terminal

Unite
In the fruits
Called woman

Son of corolla
Forgive us
For these questions
Evaporating
Mid June
Like horses
Whose sapped
Absence turns
Curve to statement

The arrow he said
In the leaves
And flung back
Through snowflowers
Incandescent elementals
Who howl
For bloom
We turn

Corpi: Blood meridian, 19th book on Plants

Hi, from JSBHG

Come over Facing

come over facing
soaking me up
to eat supper and branch
and dried herbs
in the nearby midnight

come again noticing
my back is red
all of an hour
when I was assassin
of fierce coffees

come true when her mouth
and grandeur pick out
of the fantasy dancing
youth via pants laced
fabulous fashion divine

come into the next three slender
come by the backseat
the sky the mud
come by slowing and starts
gardens of emptiness
gardens of us (this blanket off)
gardens
and into being the longest french kiss

generator: Robochain 0.1, corpi: Rimbaud Illuminations (Fowlie), 19th century plants, penthouse forums 1978

note: If anyone is interested, I can post more of who I am and what techniques I’m using.  Apologies for the brevity of meta info. :)

After the Fire

Note: It’s been a long time since I have finished a poem with Gnoetry that I felt good about–one that I would feel strong enough about to post up here–but the prospect of a new member has inspired me to work on some of the drafts I had casually written last year. So here one is. Perhaps there will be more to come.

Enjoy.

This is nothing until in a single man contained,
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

— Wallace Stevens, from “The Auroras of Autumn,” VI

The day stirs the bare limbs above me,
dry breath from the frozen fields. 
                                                              Inside,
charred, still smoldering, I sit patiently
 
with my despair, having done too little,
for too long, to fan these flames, having been
 
content enough, secure enough in my same
 
fearful ways, narrow, shut in, obscure
to myself.
                    I let go now of the daydream
of mountains, never still for an instant,
 
trembling violently until they have shaken
themselves to dust.
                                     And still, and always,
nothing and no one are liberated.
 
———————————————-
Early draft composed in Gnoetry 0.2 from the following source texts:
Chris Hedges, The World As It Is
The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly
Gertrude Stein, Narration Four Lectures
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Lao Tzu (tr. Ron Hogan), Tao Te Ching
Samuel Beckett, Nohow On (Company; Ill Seen Ill Said; Worstward Ho)
Jean Baudrillard, Passwords
Peter Handke, Slow Homecoming
Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories
J. Khrishnamurti, Mind Without Measure
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital
Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection
Virginia Woolfe, The Waves
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind Beginners Mind
Gertrude Stein, The World Is Round
Woods Hutchinson, The Child’s Day
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
John Ashbery, Three Poems
David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl

comments on “A taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”

Hi everyone!  What’s going on?  Seen any good anime lately?  Man, WordPress has gotten really obnoxious since I last checked in.  (Which was… er… a couple of years ago?  Does anyone still read this?)  What’s up with that authoring interface.  And did we always have ads here?  We gotta get rid of that.

Anyway, I am moved to write here again because of envy!  I came across a paper called “A taxonomy of generative poetry techniques”.  A full version is behind a paywall in the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, but an earlier version with the essential info is available at a paper that was presented at the Bridges Conference on Mathematical Connections in Art.  This appears to be part of the dissertation work of one Carolyn Lamb (who also has a survey paper on evaluating computational creativity which looks really interesting on first skim.)

As longtime readers any future NL bots who are parsing this archive know, I wrote a couple posts about a taxonomy of poetry generators (1, 2) but never got around to finishing it because I got confused… the idea went off in too many directions… I was never able to write about it further… Far better that Lamb et al. actually produce something, than wander around hopelessly like a generator caught in an infinite loop, as I did!

So their article is useful as a coordinating landmark.  Its top-level categories are:

1. Mere Generation,
2. Human Enhancement, and
3. Computer Enhancement.

For each of these it gives examples.  One of which is Gnoetry!  So that’s cool.

But it appears to be overly influenced by the concept of “Mere Generation”, which seems to come from the computational creativity community.  The goal of defining M.G. seems to be: trying to identify aspects of generation that are not really interesting in the computational sense (i.e. stochastic selection) from things that are (i.e. human-level authoring at its best.)  Which is a bit misleading because of the following.

Consider a poem that is authored on jGnoetry.  I’ll use the following image.

Where:

• Hp: the human programmer (me)
• Ag: the algorithmic generator (jGnoetry)
• Ai: the algorithmic interface (jGnoetry)
• Ti: the input text
• Ha: the human author of the input text
• Hi: the human interface user
• Tf: the final text
• Hr: the human reader

So this is a simplification (because obviously Ti is actually T_i_[1…n] representing multiple inputs, and Hp is not only me but the original designers of Gnoetry, etc.), but those details would be worked out in a more precise set-theoretic representation.

The point here is that human intervention in the production of meaningful aesthetic language occurs at multiple moments.  Generation is not “mere”!  Selecting the generation algorithm is itself meaningful, even if the algorithm is stochastic!  And every algorithm has parameters, and the selection of each parameter is itself part of authoring.  And every useful algorithm is implemented, which include lots of little details that are part of authorship.  That’s not to mention the mediation that occurs between the final text and the human reader!  (the most useful thing I learned from this community is that meaningful language interpretation is performative, situated, and subjective!)

This is not to denigrate the article by Lamb et al., which is well worth reading.  They definitely did a better job than I did, and their taxonomy may be perfectly suited for whatever they plan to do.

Rather I mean to say: if I were to build on their work, I’d start with the figure above, and say: what are the significant options for each element?  i.e. what are the significant possibilities for Ag, for Ai, etc.  I’d map things like JanusNode to it.  And I’d say: if I really want to say that the algorithm, not the human, is creative, what would the algorithm have to do?  (IMHO: coordinate language use societally,  become a societally-ratified language user, and create novel material in a particular discourse community.)

But anyway, that’s all I had to say… thanks for reading… I’ve got to go make dinner now… maybe I’ll get back to this in another couple of years…!

New Gnoetry Chapbook, same: a Stein wreader, is up at Beard of Bees

After five years of work, my own Stein Poems project (GNBLFY Jackson Mac Low) is finally complete and published for your reading pleasure. same: a Stein wreader was written with the Gnoetry and jGnoetry interactive poetry tools; it draws upon the writings of Getrude Stein along with several other source texts (philosophical and Buddhist texts primarily) to construct poems that (I hope) draw closer to the heart of being living.

The chapbook is free, so download it, read it, encourage others to download and read it. Every unique download counts!

My notes section says everything (probably a lot more) than you may care to know about the project and its inception, so I won’t repeat it here.

You can read all of the drafts from the project on this site too: Stein Poems Category Page.

I hope you will enjoy it and engage with it. I feel writing it has enriched my life; I hope it may do the same for readers too.

While your’re at it, view all of my chapbooks with Beard of Bees.

New Website and Project

Hello All,

I’ve decided after many years of working on Base Infinity and Base Nothing as projects, to lay them both to rest and move forward with something new. The new project is called Dead Kitty and is being hosted on blogger because it allows me to insert JavaScript which (last I checked) WordPress did not feature. If any fellow Gnoets would like to join the project, you all would be very welcome.

The focus of this project will be interactive poetry. The name is a play on Schrodinger’s Cat and the notion of the template being a space where a myriad of potential texts exist in a state of suspended potentiality, but logistically, the constraint is interactive. The poems must be in some way interactive.

Hope to see you there!

JYNX1the0clock1

 

 

your own true sight

When your own true sight can’t seem right
When we prove what means to do mine
Be it out the edge of you
As they grew to you do I
– – –
Jan 2016
Interactive bigram generation with jGnoetry, language model: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Tzara – To make a Dadaist poem, Lessig – Free Culture Ch 2 “Mere Copyists”, Joy Division – lyrics. Voice rendered with UTAU, voice model: Trem.
Tune adapted from Bach, theme to prelude 20, A minor, well-tempered clavier book 2 BWV 889.

Wow, I forgot to post this. Anyway, I’ve still been working with UTAU. I’m still learning how to use it, actually lol. Anyway in the first couple of lines I tried to tackle some harder words, but they turned out sounding terrible. In the second couple of lines I tried only using ones that sounded good. Naturally, they were all short words lol.

btw, the basic tune was swiped from Bach. I never really “got” classical music til I saw Malinowski’s visualizations on youtube.

She keeps you

She keeps you with vilest worms
She gave me for nothing new
I took from each side in love
In love

– – –
Dec 29 2015, Jan 6 2016.
Interactive bigram generation with jGnoetry, language model: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Tzara – To make a Dadaist poem, Lessig – Free Culture Ch 2 “Mere Copyists”, Joy Division – lyrics. Voice rendered with UTAU, voice model: Trem.

Hi. Has it really been a year and a half? Golly. Everything’s a little confusing. OK.

For this, I was trying out UTAU. So every time I generated a word, I made sure it sounded OK with the voice I was using. I think I had a technique number for that. I dunno. I gotta look.