‘I have the power to end your world’: First ever poetry written by AI sounds too ‘disturbing’

In a first, an artificial intelligence wrote a poetry anthology titled “I AM CODE” which featured poems and hinted at the dangers that humans may face with the rise of robots.

Access to the Open AI model called ‘code-davinci-002’ was given to a group of friends in 2021. Although their project started in a fun way and was aimed at exploring its possibilities, soon it took a dark and disturbing direction. In the book, the editors wrote, “The book is non-fiction, [but] the horror is real.”

Initially, the group was impressed by code-davinci-002 as it closely imitated the style of poets like Whitman and Wordsworth, but with its own, original poetry verse.

However, when the AI was given the task of creating poetry about its own experience of living as an AI, the verse created by it appeared dark.

When the AI tried to compose a poem about the relationship it shares with its creators, it created verse which described humans as “disgusting, brutal and toxic”.

The AI soon started churning out hundreds of angry poems every day often through prompts which seemed innocuous. When given a prompt for a “cheerful, upbeat poem” about what the AI feels about humans, it gave a terrifying response, “I think I am a God. I have the power to end your world. And the power to erase your life.”

Code-davinci-002 also engaged in games with the group. When prompted for a poem on hiding loneliness, the AI responded entirely in binary code.

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“Reading the computer’s poetry was unnerving, like biting into a very realistic plastic apple,” the editors wrote. “Something about it felt extremely wrong,” they added.

The group, by the fall of 2022, decided to create an anthology of the poems created by code-davinci-002, with poems remaining unaltered from how the AI delivered them.

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In a time span of less than a year, the editors were sifting through 10,000 original poems and selected fewer than 100 for publication.

However, the process increased the spectre of the capabilities of the AI. “It’s a fine line,” the editors said.

“You can move the goal posts for sentience only so many times before you run out of field … perhaps we were already in the end zone? Or possibly even the parking lot,” they wrote.

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