There have been a few posts about AI lately. 
Well, my speciality is in haiku and to a lessor extent in Japanese history and mythology, so I thought I'd chat with an AI bot about these topics. I chatted with the Open AI bot for about an hour about these. It took the bot about 1-5 minutes to give each answer, so there was a lot of waiting on my part, but most of the answers were pretty good! Let me share some highlights below and you can be the judge.
I started off directly, asking about what haiku is.
That's a pretty textbook answer. Not quite correct, but it's the standard. So the AI knows how to look up info. But as I often find myself explaining, only some schools insist on a 5-7-5 count; many others use a freer style with no syllable count. I wonder what the AI has to say about this...
Another pretty good answer! I wonder if it knows about the most famous haiku poet...
How about the far less known (outside of Japan) Santōka, my personal favorite?
Ah well. I guess Wikipedia was not among the sources used to train this AI. Let's jump into history! Starting with one of the more important events in Japanese history (and one of the most well-known).
Ok. Let's go for what could be an even more important event but one that is probably less well-known outside of Japan. Also let's change the question to make it more of an essay question.
Wow. No need to do homework anymore, eh? High school students these days have it so good!
How about some more detail on that event mentioned in the answer.
I figured it would be pretty good at giving factual answers about factual events. But what about legends and myths? Could the AI do it?
I should have expected that. Heike crabs and the legend surrounding them is fairly famous. Even Carl Sagan did a piece on them for Cosmos in which he guessed... Hmm. Let's ask the AI about that.
Ok, a swing and a miss. Carl Sagan thought Heike Crabs were a great example of humans influencing nature. Superstitious Japanese fishermen catching crabs would have thrown back any Heike crabs while keeping the ordinary crabs to eat, thus overtime the population of Heike crabs would have increased quite a bit relative to the population of regular crabs.
It does kind of look like an angry samurai face, eh?
But I digress. Back to the AI.
Let's delve further into mythology with a much less well-known figure.
I wasn't expecting that, but ok, so the AI has been trained on a lot of mythology too.
How about folk stories.
A few mistakes. If I were asking my students this question I'd give this answer a B. Still pretty good though. Let's ask about one of those mistakes.
Speaking of the heart sutra. (I cut off my question here by accident. I asked what it was)
More factual look up of info, so not as impressive. I don't really like the English translation. When I chant it, I chant it in Japanese. Well, the Japanese use the Chinese version, but Japanese pronunciation of Chinese anyway (it's a long story). Can we convert it?
I'll cut it off to save space, but the AI pasted everything. How about another conversion.
Ok, so factual info is pretty good. How about opinion?
Geez, again another answer that would have gotten me a good grade in high school. When this AI improves and becomes even more accessible, teachers at public schools are going to have a problem.
So let's jump into art. Specifically haiku.
... river of time ... wisdom shines. Haiku should never rhyme, so that's a strike, but not bad.
Let's go back to a previous topic.
Better!
Not as good as the previous. Is the field name "Genpei" or are "Genpei Warriors" clashing? But bonus points for the very traditional last line.
Well, we are all on Hive, so how about a haiku about that. I asked and this time the AI even explained its reasoning for the poem.
How about crypto and Bitcoin?
Is there anything the AI can't do???
I'm hungry now. Hmm... the other day I wrote a post about Enka, the Japanese music genre. I wonder....
Just what we need. AI Enka singers.
So what have we learned here. The AI can do pretty well giving us factual answers to anything it's been trained on, either real things, mythological things, or literature. The AI can also do a decent job with essay questions. The AI even makes decent haiku and can compose a song! The future is going to be interesting...
(title graphic by Tara Winstead: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-reaching-out-to-a-robot-8386434/, text added by me in PS)
| David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |
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