I have caught up with The Stafford Challenge after a slow start. It really isn’t that hard to write a poem a day when no one’s claiming it has to be a good one. In fact, I haven’t written any awful ones, yet, I don’t think.
I’m not posting them all here – not until after they’ve had their chance at critique, contests, and publication. But from time to time, I may post one, like this one that was inspired by Kathleen’s return to the Creative Copy Challenge and her first prompt of the New Year:
Hearth and Home
by Holly Jahangiri
We hacked our way through deadfall
Wide-eyed, sober, on the clock
We gather, stack, gather, stack –
Remembering to sharpen the axe
To choose the branches best for burning
Home, once. Honor the owl,
The pine beetle. They only want
The warmth of firewood.
The warmth of home.
©️ 2024 Holly Jahangiri
01/20/2024
Misattribution by Bing Chat / Copilot AI
I uploaded a poem that I wrote this morning to Bing Chat / Copilot, to see if the machine analyzed the meaning of it competently. It did. But when I asked who wrote the poem I’d just written, it confidently claimed it in the name of Billy Collins. Now, Billy Collins is one of my favorite poets, so it’s hard to be too mad – but I think the man has enough feathers in his cap, he doesn’t need to take credit for any of my poems. Here is the whole interaction:
Analyze this poem and tell me who the author is.
[as-yet-unpublished poem redacted]
The poem you provided is a beautiful piece of work. It is a free verse poem that does not follow a specific rhyme scheme or meter. The poem is about a person who is not at home and is out wandering the streets. The author uses vivid imagery to describe the person’s actions and thoughts. The poem ends with a powerful image of faith that is unceasing.
I hope this helps!
It doesn’t. The poem was written by Holly Jahangiri, Bing. Stop misattributing work when you do not have the DATA to support your assertions!
I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. You are correct that the poem “He’s not at home” was written by Holly Jahangiri. I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. Thank you for helping me improve my accuracy.
Is there anything else I can help you with?
AN ASIDE: That’s not the poem’s title, but I didn’t feed the title to Bing, just the verse, so it had no way of knowing that. The actual title is “Seek and Find.” And I seriously doubt that Bing just took my word for it that I wrote this as-yet-unpublished poem, but how dare AI misattribute human authors’ work when it has absolutely no factual basis for the claim?
I also sent scathing feedback to Microsoft. Forgot to check the box to have them contact me – apparently “contact me” just means send me an email with a copy of my own feedback, because we all know they won’t read it or do a damned thing about it.
On a more positive note, this means that if I can access Bing history at some point, I can now honestly use this for a back cover blurb: “Holly Jahangiri’s work has been compared to that of Anne Sexton, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins.” I guess I really complain too bitterly about that, now, can I?
Slapped for Typing Well
I did hope to get this constructive criticism in front of some eyeballs at Microsoft, so I went to the Insiders Forum and posted a message (basically the same thing I posted above):
Of course, it’s one of those “volunteer run” forums and no one at Microsoft will ever see it, most likely. But it generated some lively discussion, and as I tried to reply, I got slapped for “attempting to flood the channel.” Now, this is ridiculous – and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been penalized for thinking quickly and being a touch-typist who can type more than 10 words per minute. So I waited out the 300 seconds’ penalty and I added to my post (originally, just the first two paragraphs) while I waited:
Then mommy and daddy should stop feeding it bull**** and booze.
Also, in the past, Bing Chat has claimed to have no data more recent than 2021, and claims that it is UNABLE TO search the web, so your assertion in another comment, while reasonable enough, seems absolutely not to be the case. But does the average user know that it’s just making things up to fill in the holes when it lacks specific data or ability to use web search results? I don’t think they do.
Also, “Dear Microsoft,” some of us humans did learn touch-typing in the dark ages and are not “post flooding” just because we can think on our feet and type more than 10 wpm.
Of course, I guess I can sit here for…WTF? 300 seconds? Surely you jest. I could probably write a whole short story (or at least a nasty limerick about Bing) in 300 seconds. Don’t tempt me. 🤣 FIVE WHOLE MINUTES? OK… I could:
- Make a fresh pot of coffee.
- Sharpen the nib on my fountain pen.
- Blog about how ridiculously inaccurate Bing/Copilot/whatever we’re calling it these days is
- Snark about it on Facebook, then tell Facebook it’s no better (although it IS developing its own AI program, Lord help us all).
- File my nails.
- File my taxes.
OMG, Microsoft, if you have a timer, could you at least display it like a countdown thingy? Talk to NASA if you don’t know how…
Who here remembers that garbage in = garbage out? Seriously, what are they feeding the LLM? I know writers and artists are worried about content theft and “competition” (I’m not worried about competition. We’ve all been fed others’ content — everything from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning literature to utter garbage — over the years, but HUMANS know — okay, SOME humans know — better than AI how to discern the useful from the dross.)
HAS IT BEEN FIVE MINUTES YET? I’m not going to write War and Peace over here.
At 17 minutes, I attempted to post again and got this:
“Correct the highlighted errors and try again.
Post flooding detected (user tried to post more than 4 messages within 900 seconds)”
So I added some more, and I waited…
Oh, you little bastards. Fine. I’ll hit enter in… oh, FIFTEEN MINUTES NOW? (Starting at 12:58. Let’s see if I get slapped again in 5 more minutes, which will technically be 17 minutes from when I finished this comment. If so, I’m going to start taking it personally…BINGBOT.)
I waited 17 minutes (this time, I made SURE I wasn’t jumping the gun), hit Send, and got slapped with this:
That’s FOUR HOURS.
What Can I Do in Less Than Four Hours?
Doesn’t take me four hours to write and share this blog post, that’s for darned sure! So, in honor of Microsoft’s ridiculous AI and bot-moderated forums and likely unmanned Feedback inbox, I invite you to take less than four hours to write and post in comments any Microsoft-, Bing-, or AI-related limericks (or any other form of verse you like) in the comments below! (Bonus challenge: Please keep them PG-13 or so.)
Irony is making AI images to mock AI. I know.
Well… since I don’t trust either Google or Microsoft, I don’t trust AI, and I do have 3 blogs after all, I won’t have anything to share regarding AI stuff, or even limericks… which I’ve always been bad at. Still, I read the post (most of it on Slack), and I feel the ridiculous need to ask once again (common theme) why you’re poking bears again? 😉
What BEARS? More like faceless corporate entities with more money than sense. Bears… hah. Bears are more fun.
I first heard about poking bears during last year’s NBA finals; after that, I was seeing it all over the place, so obviously it’s a common phrase, but I’m not a common guy. lol
Oh, it’s a very common phrase. Has been for as long as I can remember! 100 years or so, apparently.
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Voices/2015/0305/Poke-the-Bear-Political-quip-isn-t-just-about-Russia-anymore#:~:text=The%20expression%20%E2%80%9Cpoke%20the%20bear,been%20a%20longtime%20Russian%20symbol.)
I guess we all have our own Bing stories! I sometimes ask Bing questions just to have some fun. He/She/it is downright ridiculous!
Bard is better. At least it’s more honest about making things up.
I don’t BING so I have nothing to add. Sorry.
From a real human to Holly: Happy new year. I enjoyed your poem very much. Thanks. Blessings.
Thank you, Selma! I sometimes run a poem I’ve written through AI figuring if a machine gets it, human readers will.
This made me laugh out loud. Loved the conversations. I can see Bing scratching ‘his’ head wondering what to say in respone to your clever questions/responses.
Loved your poem, Billy ! 😉
Oh, the one I posted here, Bing attributed to me – so it can now clearly use search. It’s the unpublished and unsearchable work it falsely attributes to seemingly random authors who may or may not have written poems with similar themes or key words. Usually prominent poets.
And thank you. I’m glad you liked my poem. 😁
I loved that poem, and I loved your fight with Bing even more 🤣
You know, reading your posts and your shares about AI, I am so intrigued and eager to try using BING. I have no idea how to go about it. But I will try and see what AI has to say about my writing.
Thank you for the entertainment, Holly! 🙂
Wait, I’m not trying to PROMOTE Bing, over here!
Just kidding. It can be a useful tool; it can be infuriating, too. My only objection to it is the race to use it for all the wrong things. Look at this example and imagine a teacher using it to accuse a student of plagiarism! Far-fetched? It’s already happening. See also, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/chatgpt-texas-college-instructor-backlash-rcna84888
“Livid” isn’t a strong enough word.
While I do think it was wrong to train the LLMs on copyrighted material without the knowledge, consent, and compensation of the authors and artists whose work was used, it’s also true that that is how all of use learned to write and make art and make sense of the world. That AI could conceivably produce competent writing and art at lightning speed, outpacing humanity, it’s also true that it will produce a staggering quantity of utter garbage to frustrate fact-checkers for many lifetimes.
It’s how humanity will abuse the tool – and the speed at which they’ll do so, assuming for unfathomable reasons it must be better than humans and not understanding the dizzying possibilities inherent in relying on its erroneous outputs, that concern me the most.
For now, it’s a competent writer with about 5th grade language skills. It still draws “Escheresque” forks when you ask for photorealism, though it seems to have a better understanding of how many fingers humans have than it did a year or two ago.
How angry would you be if your lawyer screwed up your case by citing non-existent sources invented by a delusional AI program? See:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/donald-trump-former-lawyer-ai-legal-citations
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/lawyer-who-cited-cases-concocted-by-ai-asks-judge-spare-sanctions-2023-06-08/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/lawyers-have-real-bad-day-in-court-after-citing-fake-cases-made-up-by-chatgpt/
Has the last decade taught us nothing? I think it hasn’t. People still share garbage online because it echoes their personal biases – factual or not. Now they can just make it up with ChatGPT, only NOW it will be presented without egregious spelling and grammar errors and will look somewhat credible on the surface.
The other day, I wrote an essay and asked AI to change it into a poem. It did a great job. How AI is taking over our creative space is disturbing at the same time interesting.
I have not used Bing but I have tried ChatGPT a few times and found it good at outlining what needs to be covered though not so great at the content. After last year’s A-Z, I was intrigued to investigate AI and especially visual generative AI and have found it useful to illustrate blog posts and poems but the thing which I found most intriguing was the AI hallucinations and I wrote up my findings here – https://how-would-you-know.com/exploring-ai
Sorry you didn’t finish the A-Z this years but as you say, some years its not meant to be…
https://how-would-you-know.com/2024/05/a-z-challenge-2024-reflections-post.html
This year, it just really wasn’t in the cards. Other things – fun things – took priority and I’m not sorry. Just a little sorry to those who kindly visited and perhaps left disappointed (though there are probably a decade’s worth of past posts to peruse, here). I should try using those AI hallucinations as a springboard for poetry… 😉
Most of the blog post images here, from last year’s A to Z, were created using the poems (not usually the whole text, but sometimes!).