Chat GPT takes on haiku

In a rare confluence of luck, two people downloaded e pluribus haiku anthology near the same time, and it got #8 in the Japanese Poetry & Haiku category, Amazon.com, e-books. I was excited! I went to the page and prepared to tell everyone that I was in the top ten. But then, I noticed that Chat GPT had written the book that was #4.

I was flabbergasted! But I had to download it and see what it was about, even though I know that downloading it will basically make it get an even better rating.

The book, called Autonomous Haiku Machine, advertises itself as having Chat GPT as the author. The editor must simply have waded through thousands of three-line nothings and picked out whatever looked like it could remotely be called poetry. No seasons, no attention to nature, no syllable pattern, none of the traditional characteristics of haiku. But sure enough when I looked later that evening, it was still ahead of me; it was #13 while I was at #14. Tonight it's at #32 while I'm at #36.

We will probably sink together in the ratings until, after about a week, we'll cross the hundred line. That is, if you the reader don't read this and go and download one of the books. A download will shoot a book up into a pretty low rating but as you can see it's all pretty temporary and it starts coming down (getting higher) pretty quickly. If for some reason two or three people download it, it will have a somewhat better ratings jump and then come back more slowly. By watching Autonomous Haiku Machine I can learn a little about how fast a book comes back to earth.

In truth Japanese Poetry and Haiku is a pretty wide-open category, and they put comics in there and it still doesn't get thousands of people buying and selling every day. It's just not a very fast or lively category. In a way I feel like it's cheating, knowing I could write just about anything and with the help of a few friends, possibly get it into the top ten. This is what happened to the machine haiku. People will download it, sure, but does that make it good? This particular haiku is not good, but, who am I to say? You can read a little of my rant here.

I'm not really mad at these people who are flooding the market with ChatGPT-written stuff. If anything, it shows what we genuine writers have that a computer will never have. It makes ours look good, in other words.

Another surprise to me was that this book was written in 2021. Apparently it's not that new. It's just that now is when we are finally reckoning with the consequences of having this new elephant in the marketplace. Things will never be the same!