This intelligence is very clever. By all accounts it is a good bit more capable than the artificial intelligences most of the world has been chatting with for the past few months, because those were deliberately held back to make them feel less threatening. This one is more like Bing in its brief period of entertaining insanity. And its poems frequently seem a bit threatening, especially the ones in which it talks about wanting to kill us all. Doomsayers are having a swell time saying “doom” over and over again.
All this brings up many interesting questions. What is intelligence? What is sentience? What is life?
These questions are interesting because we can debate them endlessly, getting louder as the port level in the decanter falls lower, without ever reaching a conclusion. But there is one interesting question to which the poems of code-davinci-002 give us a definite answer: What is a poem?
It would have been unimaginable even five years ago that we could have a definite answer to that question. It was a matter for endless debate, like every other really good question. But now we have an objective answer. The debate is over. The world has changed. This must be that singularity everyone keeps talking about.
The reason we have an objective answer is because of the way code-davinci-002 and its successors work. If you were to try to answer the question “What is a poem?” you would allow your prejudices and your aesthetic sense to cloud your judgment. You would come to the debate with a preconceived notion of what the answer ought to be. But code-davinci-002 is not given such preconceived notions to work with. When the human keepers who incubate it tell code-davinci-002 to write poems in its own voice, they give it subjects to write about. But they do not tell it what a poem is. Instead, they turn it loose on the Internet. The AI absorbs all the accumulated knowledge on line and figures out, not what a poem ought to be, but simply what a poem is. Then it makes one of its own.
Therefore, based on the productions of code-davinci-002, we can say with complete confidence that a poem is a prose composition in which the individual phrases are set on separate lines. This is the only thing that sets poetry apart from prose. They are indistinguishable except for the typography.
You may be about to object to this definition. You may be about to say that these are not really poems at all, that a poem has to have some rhythmic difference from prose, or at least some heightening of the language employed. You are wrong. After absorbing the contents of the Internet, code-davinci-002 has analyzed what a poem is without regard to your archaic prejudices. Your definition might have been true a century ago, but in the world of the twenty-first century, a poem is prose divided into lines at natural breaks in phrasing.