This week, I commissioned a haiku on the Great Fire of London in 1666 from a promising young poet, the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. A few seconds later, it produced this: “Ashes fall like snow/Great fire sweeps through London town/Destruction reigns supreme.”
Well, not bad. There is a seasonal simile in the first line. I am less convinced by the second, which reads suspiciously like the assignment itself. The third contains too many syllables but also a double wordplay on “reigns”, invoking both the English monarchy and ashes raining. Was it deliberate?
It beat the sonnet I asked ChatGPT to write on the same subject, which had a dodgy metre and stolid rhymes (“In the end, the fire was finally quenched/Leaving a legacy of courage and strength”). Consider also its country music chorus about New Year’s Eve: “I’ll raise a glass to the old/And make a toast to the new/Bring on the fireworks and cheers/It’s time to start anew.”