Leary Philosophers

Recently, I used OpenAI’s GPT-3 DaVinci-003 model to (amongst other silly things) write a limerick about Immanuel Kant:

Old Immanuel Kant at a glance

Was a philosopher whose thought could entrance

He wrote of morality

In a manner quite contrary

To the views that the louts would advance

GPT3 DaVinci-003, generated by CJ Blunt

With OpenAI’s ChatGPT interface for the language model taking off, I wanted to see whether ChatGPT’s tweaked approach would do any better. Certainly, it beats Edward Lear’s dry limericking style.

David Hume:

There once was a Scotsman named Hume

Whose empiricist views caused a fume

He claimed causation

Was mere imagination

And his critics found him dour and gloom.

ChatGPT , generated by CJ Blunt

That worked. But Plato gives ChatGPT a much more difficult problem. It struggled to find rhymes for ‘Plato’ and couldn’t break out of the most generic limerick form (ending the first line with name). It tried a few eye-rhymes and half-rhymes like ‘bravado’, ‘follow’ and ‘go’, before eventually settling for this gem:

There once was a wise man named Plato

Whose ideas were hard to negate-o

He spoke of the Forms

And how the mind transforms

And his influence we can still appreciate-o

ChatGPT , generated by CJ Blunt