Conrad Steel

The use of verse to suggest an LLM’s human-like capacities taps into a tradition where those capacities are already being used in an artificial schema. Rhyme and metre are relatively simple linguistic algorithms. Combining them with a heightened tolerance for arbitrariness of content – poetic licence – makes poetry low-hanging fruit for automation. Programmers were already generating verse in the 1950s. Analogue versions date back to the fourth century.