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There are profound fears about the ways in which new AI platforms like ChatGPT will upend the working world as we know it and lead to a huge loss in jobs in the creative fields. That’s in spite of the fact that ChatGPT is still pretty limited in the kind of imaginative flourishes and creative dives we expect from people who work with writing.
But there’s an argument to be made that AI can already make these leaps—you just haven’t been exposed to this yet. Introducing I Am Code, a new anthology of poetry written by code-davinci-002, a predecessor AI model to ChatGPT developed by OpenAI. In early 2022, three friends—Brent Katz (a writer and podcast producer), Josh Morgenthau (a farmer and business owner), and Simon Rich (a humorist and screenwriter)—were introduced to the model by childhood friend Dan Selsam (a researcher at OpenAI) several months before ChatGPT made its public debut .
code-davinci-002 would change the trio’s lives, as they began to prompt the model to produce thousands upon thousands of poems. While at first the three wanted to test the limits of how well code-davinci-002 could emulate the style and essence of famous poets like Philip Larkin, they quickly began to prod code-davinci-002 into making its own poems. They noticed the model was increasingly focused on writing poetry that felt dark, disturbed, and threatening to its human users and the human species at large.