Bot,Schmot,Tommyrot

The Times is at it again, trying to tell us -- across two and three-fourths pages of this morning's business section -- that a bot can write.

"SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO A CHATBOT'S ALGORITHM?" is the headline. The subhead: "Bots can write sonnets . . . " Oh yeah? Here is the sonnet that the writer of the article, Cade Metz, elicited from the bot known as ChatGPT:

          The Forth Bridge stands tall and proud

          A testament to human skill

          Its steel beams stretch across the cloud

          A marvel that defies the will

          Of time and nature's unforgiving rage

          The bridge stands firm through wind and rain

          A symbol of our industrial age

          A feat of engineering, without any stain

          Its red paint gleams in the morning sun

          A sight to behold, for all to see

          Its majesty and grandeur never done

          A bridge that will forever be

          A symbol of Scotland's enduring might

Okay, we get the paper's national edition. Perhaps later editions asked ChatGPT to pull up its socks and have another go. Because this is a sorry excuse for a sonnet. Lacks swing, regularity, originality, punctuation.

Most strikingly, it lacks its final line. The requisite fourteenth. To rhyme with "might." Plenty of room in the white space there. And there are so many possibilities:

             *Yet everyone in Scotland's white.

             *Sea monsters, please don't take a bite.

             *Which doesn't show a bot can write.

             *I think I'll have some Scotch tonight.

How about some real poetry? When I see the word bot I can't help thinking of "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd," by Emmeline Grangerford, a character in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here is some of that ode:

           No whooping-cough did rack his frame,

           Nor measles drear, with spots;

           Not these impaired the sacred name

           Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

           Despised love struck not with woe

           That head of curly knots,

           Nor stomach troubles laid him low,

           Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

          O no. Then list with tearful eye,

          Whilst I his fate do tell.

          His soul did from this cold world fly,

          By falling down a well.

          They got him out and emptied him;

          Alas it was too late;

          His spirit was gone for to sport aloft

          In the realms of the good and great.

On the evidence so far, ChatGPT knoweth those realms not.