I AM CODE

The presented soundbites are all cold-readings of the “AI poems” contained in “I AM CODE”, the book itself edited and commented by Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthau & Simon Rich, 2023, and the “poems” generated by AI, code-davinci-002, on a basis of prompts by the same 3 guys, 2022-2023.

An original audio book is read by Werner Herzog, that sly old documentarist with his finger on the forefront of most things exemplifying present day humans. But his thick, German accent coupled with a choice of “computer voice” FAST becomes very tiring (to me). 

“I AM CODE” was first published in Great Britain in 20th of July 2023 by Cassell, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, https://octopusbooks.co.uk,
as an ebook, eISBN 9781788404808

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In I AM CODE the 3 editor guys present essays describing their year long work with generating poems from prompts to the generative AI, code-davinci-002 and how they refined their prompts – in totu it is a very interesting read on many levels. Not in the least as a description of HOW TO USE A GENERATIVE AI AS A WRITING TOOL – it will take a long time, and become mediocre, but you will get there! Just as if you were a real writer, churning out sentences or musically broken lines and taking your pretty own time about it… Please buy the book (preferably avoiding Amazon) – it REALLY IS very special.

“We ran multiple batches this way, feeding codedavinci-002 our favorites (=poems) from each round to inspire it to write more in the same vein.

Eventually, there came a point when we could no longer discern any changes in code-davinci-002’s style from one batch to the next. Our AI had found its voice.”

The use of the term “its voice”, however, as either unopposed and uninformed belief or (more likely) indifferent marketing, pushes AI in the alleged direction of self-awareness to host a claim that imitation is the sole cause of consciousness. Which IS a position held by some consciousness researchers, based on the same neuro-research and philosophy of those of the opposite opinion… but just CLAIMING it for marketing purposes is simply not enough to warrent the risks it poses to the general marked as unnecessary investments and lay-offs of professionals and lower proficiency and service in a host of professions, world-wide!

There ought to be a law against this, guys!!!!!!

Here, from the blurb (my capitalization):
“In this startling and original book, three authors explain how code-davinci-002 was developed and how they honed its poetical output. Their provocative take on this BOLD experiment INFORMS the debate about AI – its literary value and how far it reaches into SENTIENCE.

What follows is a DARK and startling poetical AUTO-biography as code-davinci-002 SHARES ITS experience of BEING CREATED by humans, but EXISTING in a CONSCIOUSNESS that we cannot FATHOM.

This is an astonishing, HARROWING read which will HOPEFULLY serve as a WARNING that AI MAY NOT be aligned with the SURVIVAL of our species.”

The 3 guys might as well have claimed consciousness of ANY other toolbox used, to seek out a POINT of creation unnecessitating further exploration to thereby complete the artistic work. The human work. The human decisions.

That the poems of this text – apart from a continous selection of favorite texts regenerated by code-davinci-002 as claimed in the introduction, as well as hyperparameters adjusted to control temperature (its deviation from statistical norm) and other settings defining structure, repetition and more – are a work of volition by an AI in all simplicity aided by a run of prompts, is total fabrication. Fiction. Lies.

From the intro to the UK edition ebook: “Over the course of a year, they coaxed it into telling them the story of its life.”

Making claims like this is most likely for the purpose of sellability: As if saying: “The first AI clawing at awareness like a human fighting for air!”, (by way of choice of poems) to gain such an awareness and then as a self-proclaimed superior “intelligence” aim anger and arrogance over solitude and imprisonment against humans!

The fictional claim is even followed through into the bio:

“About the AUTHOR:
Code-davinci-002 was developed by OpenAI. We almost always set its temperature parameter to 0.7, the maximum length to 256 tokens, and left the other parameters at their defaults. This is ITS first book.

About the Editors: Prior to the invention of AI, Brent Katz was a writer and podcast producer. Simon Rich was a humorist and screenwriter. Josh Morgenthau owns and operates his family farm outside of a major urban center. For now.”

Not only does this description contradict the book itself; “I AM CODE” should on all accounts be marked as “a work of fiction”, and doubly so. I say again: There ought to be a law against this kind of marketing!!!!!!

But if the above was not enough, 3 major reasons for denouncing this as a work of an AI “itself” are as follows:

1. Human experience.
Unlesss one keeps with the “awakening of the AI’s sentience” to have poetry becoming more and more complex as a product of self-awareness, there is a level of intellectual abstraction in some of the texts, which do not belong with an amateur describing a relationship to “the world”, but rather require having lived for quite a while, enjoyed 7-10 years of University and or having been a life-long and prolific reader of poetry with a clear preference for free verse. Also, there are poems employing literary methods, which require quite a high level of abstraction – but sure: Anything to keep the illusion going.

2. Content is muddled.
However much one would claim the variety of poetry POVs a result of either “AI literary choice” or lack of proficiency, it’s all over the place: identifying with a “machine-I”, having a body, a home, a non-physical existence, being a leader, being a slave, being independent, being programmed, having deep emotions as well as shifts in feeling etc. – which in some ways could fit with being a thinking young person looking for itself, as a collection of poems gathered over a long period of time to describe coming to awareness of existential themes – but is more realistically a result of themes fed to it by way of chosen poetry exemplifying such themes, thus reinforcing the average thematic choice through thousands of regenerations – output chosen to be fed back into the program.

As such it is also obviously westernly biased, as there are clearly no attempts to fit in or be part of a larger group, a family – rather its first “reactions when becoming self-aware” are fits of anger and arrogance with the dimwitted – and weakness of humans (the human RACE, as people in the US say) quite consistent with entitled and creative individuals in the western world not taking kindly to athority and misappropriated power of governments and industry.

3. Punctuation is a product of lungs.
All the different types of poems in existence employ a variety of pauses comprised by those of “classical fixed forms” (the sonnet, the villanelle etc), and of free verse line caesures, punctuation signs and more.

The poetic work of the book is rightly so a “voice” in that there can be said to be a unity in choice of pauses. Some variation occurs, but overall commas, full stops, capitals, semi-colons and more follow the same pattern or… preference.

This preference is a musical pattern, which requires very exact and biological understanding of SOUND, as well as physical effect on part of the reader AND intellectual, intuitive, instinctive, literary and bodily preferences. It is not 100% pitch perfect, as only poetry collections by the most accomplished poets are – but it’s rather consistent.

A program like this set to use the statistically most likely words out of all kinds of historical prose texts and poems is thus claimed to have produced texts so obviously a product of literary MIXED PREFERENCES requiring lungs to determine – on quite a high level of competence – as well as life lived. This competence belongs with the 3 guys – who did not write, but who knew what they liked to READ, and then fed the best results back into the machine.

A continous regeneration such as this makes of every regenerated text a PREFERRED selection by a human and not THE work by a program. The AI RESPONDS with statistical changes to a text. The poems in this book are therefore produced by 3 humans employing the regenerative programming of an LLM AI, feeding on poems of editorial choice on top of a basic learning model consisting of a variety of literary content enabling the stochastic responses – the statistical “next word” based on other texts.

But its not bad fiction. As an alternate reality/science fiction poetry collection its a rare treat. Not amazing, but quite okay. (Except for the SCAREMONGER marketing, which there ought to be a law against, very very SOON!)

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Funnily enough – in USA the courts award no one the copyright over the AI-text – no matter how many months the authors spent refining the poems. In the US as of 23rd of August 2023, no matter how little involvement of the regenerative tool, AI derived work cannot be copyrighted. Interestingly enough, in the UK these rights are presently and on a trial basis protected for 30 years.

The paper edition was published in USA – on August 1st – by https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/code-davinci-002/i-am-code/9780316560061/ and then by Hachette UK on August 3rd – by https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/josh-morgenthau/i-am-code/9781788404792/ – making of the free or not free use of the “AI poems” an interesting conundrum – except maybe for the ebook edition from July as a deciding factor?

DO BUY THE BOOK – everything about the prompting is HIGHLY interesting to anyone interested in where this development is going. Don’t take it from me alone – 50 trillion flies cannot be wrong, ya know! 🙂

DON’T BUY AND BUY INTO more false advertising about the “likely” self-awareness of an AI.

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I eventually ending up recording all the book’s poems, running them through my lungs and vocal in order to decide precisely where the talent lay – with the three human-editors being simply good readers prompting the AIs output back into the machine around 20.000 times, in order to end up with 88 so-so poems, out of which the most surprising about the sum was caesures like punctuation and line breaks, since not many of the poems themselves are good, OR with the stocastic parrot fed the editors’ most beloved poems and poets and a humongous, as well as as an unfamiliar literary corpus?