Monday, May 08, 2023

i had an unexpected success, a marketing confluence where my book e pluribus haiku anthology unexpected reached #8 for a few hours this afternoon. i noticed, and quick put it on twitter and facebook and all the places i might brag to someone. but then i noticed that chat gpt had written #4.

quick i downloaded it, and noticed that for the most part it was crap. a few times the computer strung together some images, so one could call it poetry, because if you read it and don't know that a computer just pulled the words out of the air, you still get the same images, right? it brought up issues about what haiku is, because of course the computer doesn't know from syllables, or rhymes, or a good sound, or anything. so i'm one of many who will read it and say, this computer doesn't know crap. but here it was at #4, two years and two months after it was published.

i fully expected my download to kick in and make it #1 when i checked again tonight at about seven. Instead, it was now #13 and mine was #14. oh goody, i thought, they'll travel through the lists together. but in fact if one downloads it at two in the afternoon it will take three or four hours for amazon to give it credit and bump it up. so after about an hour, in which i wrote this post about it, i checked again. and now, this book, autonomous haiku machine, was #11 while mine was #18. it had now received its bump from my download, and moved up as a result two places, where mine had moved down four by virtue of not having any new downloads. i can expect it to move down four every hour or two until the dust settles, i guess.

you can tell by my post that i'm not crazy about the book. i'm curious, though, about chat gpt in general and the worlds we live in - of poetry, short stories, novels, and history - what happens when chat gpt fills up all these #11 slots and people really don't know who wrote it? or care? this particular book, chat gpt is even in the title, you have to try hard not to figure it out. but it's interesting that slowly, it will worm its way into our world.

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