Generative AI seems to be taking over the world. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, everything has changed. You can generate text, images, and even video by feeding a prompt into one of these programs. Every month, they theoretically improve and admittedly some of them are quite impressive.

I heard someone once call this technology “the perpetual B+ machine.” In other words, what ChatGPT produces is quite good from the standpoint of someone who would have gotten an F, but it’s not good in a greater sense of the word. I think that’s true. Ask it to write a short essay and it will do so very quickly. If you have no skill at writing an essay or no knowledge of the topic, it will probably seem impressive… but if you have almost any ability, the essay produced will seem very poor.

I tested ChatGPT out on the Beat Generation last year and was not really impressed. I tested it out again about six months ago and it was even worse, having gotten very simple facts (William Burroughs’ birthday and Neal Cassady’s death date) totally wrong, for example. (Here’s a timeline of the Beat Generation that is more reliable.)

Today, I’m going to give it a strange test. To be honest, this is done out of silliness and morbid curiosity rather than any genuine interest in the technology’s potential.

A.I. Writes Howl

I was curious what would happen if I asked ChatGPT to rewrite Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem, “Howl.” However, before I did, I asked it to analyse the poem. It spat out a fairly reasonable analysis but again it’s very basic and obvious. It falls into that “B+” category that I mentioned above:

This is about what you’d expect a high school student to note after analysing the poem. It’s reasonable but not hugely insightful or original.

Now for the interesting part… What could have been done better?

This is where the analysis really fell apart. However, I gave it a stupid task, so I should have expected a stupid response.

It is interesting that the program remarked upon the rhythm (based around the repetition of “who”) as a strength, but then also noted it as a weakness to be corrected. This appears in line with the other suggestions, though, because overall it seems to misunderstand quite a lot about the poem and wants to make it less poetic and more logical (perhaps unsurprising for an AI program).

Honestly, though, as I fed it a stupid prompt, I was hoping for slightly silly suggestions. That’s exactly what I got… so let’s see how ChatGPT handled a rewrite:

Well, it certainly isn’t an improvement!

The poem has definitely become more logical. It now makes more sense in a purely mechanical way. But of course it has lost all of its charm, all of its poetry. In particular, note the changes here:

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

That was Ginsberg’s original line. ChatGPT suggests:

Angelheaded wanderers, burning for some ancient, heavenly link, searching through the night’s machinery and the starry skies above.

It has lost everything that made it poetic. The AI program has certainly attempted to make images clearer and tighten the language… but in doing so it has presented Ginsberg’s ideas in a dull and overly straightforward way.

I asked Google’s Gemini program to do the same task, and it wisely gave me the following response:

While some people would call that a fail, I’d say it’s a good case of knowing one’s limitations.

Gemini was, however, able to suggest a new cover for the version of “Howl” that ChatGPT produced:

The first one looks like an album cover for a shitty alternative band circa 2007. And is it just me or does the top half of the body face one way and the bottom half the other? And is that intentional? And more to the point, when did Allen Ginsberg ever wear skinny jeans?

The second one… well, I don’t totally hate it.

When given the same task (rewriting “Howl”), Grok (the AI component of Twitter/X) suggested this:

The first line is abysmal. It is like someone arbitrarily took a thesaurus and plucked synonyms from it. The next few lines are similarly awful. However, I really like this:

In their destitution, with eyes like hollow moons, they inhaled the mystic gloom of unheated lofts, drifting over cityscapes, lost in the rhythm of jazz.

Honestly, that’s pretty damn good. The imagery is good and the internal rhyme of “moon” and “gloom” works.

Let’s see what Grok suggested as a book cover for its shitty rewrite of “Howl”:

Good lord, that is terrible! If I saw that on a book cover, “Howl” is about the last thing I would imagine would be contained within its pages. It looks like the cover of some ungodly fantasy book.

Let’s see if Grok can redeem itself with a picture of Ginsberg actually writing “Howl”:

Well, that is certainly better… but why is he wearing an office worker’s clothes? He sort of looks like Daniel Radcliffe and James Franco (two actors who have played Ginsberg) mashed together, but perhaps with some other Hollywood actors mixed in–I can sort of see Robert Pattinson, Robert Downey Jr., and Joaquin Phoenix. The more I look, the more I see… yet the less Ginsberg there is.

For more on Allen Ginsberg and AI, check out this discussion at the Ginsberg Project. There’s more info on the same topic at the Smithsonian. If you want to know how Allen Ginsberg–a human! using pencils and typewriters and paper!–managed to write “Howl,” then take a look at this long essay.