We are in trouble

Don’t worry; it is only poetry -:)!

I never thought it would come to that, but it has.

It happened today, on this rather bleak Sunday morning.

Birds are chirping as they do, clouds are sailing over the canopy of silky skies, mist from the last night’s rain hangs in the air.

An email from a good friend of mine arrived.

He is busy working on his articles for his journo gig.

I’d read the email, and it made me smile… so, as is my habit, I wrote a response and clicked send.

A little while later, another email landed in my inbox.

My friend tells me he is experimenting with AI, and it is great fun.

So he fed the opening line of my email to it and asked it to write a poem out of it.

In two seconds flat, the mighty OpenAI spewed a poem:

How lovely to find your email on this bleak Sunday morning
A message of hope in the midst of all the darkness
Your words are a light in the storm
Thank you for being a bright spot in my day

He then tried again, and in another two seconds, this came out:

How lovely to find your email on this bleak Sunday morning
I was just about to go out and buy some flowers
To brighten up the living room
But now I think I’ll stay in
And write you a poem
Instead

I almost cried. Actually, I did cry.

Because I like the poems, especially the second one.

And because I indeed was ‘just about to go out and buy some flowers to brighten up the living room…’ and no, I said nothing of that in either of my emails.

I say to myself, it is just a coincidence, the predictable cliché AI was programmed to spew when certain terms are used. Like ‘bleak Sunday morning,’ which is what I wrote in the opening of my email.

Yes, you guessed it… it means just that — humans are predictable, and AI knows it.

It might be true then — that we are officially in trouble!