Living in Cyberiad

 "The Cyberiad," by Stanislaw Lem, is a whimsical collection of science-fiction fairy tales, in a similar style as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." It's episodic but it generally follows two intelligent machine rivals who try to outdo each other with their own invented machines. My favorite story in "The Cyberiad" is "The first sally (A), or Trurl's electronic bard."

The following contains spoilers for "The Cyberiad."

Through much hard work and countless hours of toil, Trurl has created a machine that, he hopes, can write poetry. He invites his rival Klapaucius over to test it (or to show off.) Klapaucius accepts, and after some false starts and tweaks, recites a short poem. Klapaucius is not impressed - the poem was just a pre-recorded message written by a person. Trurl invites him to make a request as a real test. Klapaucius thinks, trying to figure out the hardest request he can imagine. Finally he suggests:

"Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

Trurl begins to object...

But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,

Silently scheming,

Sightlessly seeking 

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

The story goes on from there with other bizarre requests and other poems but I'll focus on just this one, as it's my favorite. I was so used to seeing this story as a wonderful, whimsical flight of fancy (I first read this story in 1998-1999) that I completely failed to see that it's now a reality. Or is it? I was wondering, if I give this same prompt to ChatGPT, what would be the result?

Here is the experiment.

In truth, I usually see ChatGPT as just a more advanced search engine. I was fully expecting it to just lookup and return the poem from "The Cyberiad," at which point I would have had to try a similar prompt. But no, it simply went straight to its own attempt. Also surprising is that it doesn't follow the "only s" rule, for some reason. I mean, if a computer program doesn't write great poetry, we can all understand why but I absolutely do expect it to understand and follow basic, concrete rules.

I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I am astonished by the sophistication of ChatGPT. Still, it definitely falls far short of the goal.

Let's try Bing:

Arguably better; it at least follows the 's' requirement, but still wanting.

And You!:

Terrible.

We live in a science-fiction future but the world of "The Cyberiad" still retains its mystique and fascination.

Finally, a small factoid that I just learned from Wikipedia: "The Seventh Sally was also an inspiration of the game SimCity." According to the New York Times, "In the Lem story a banished tyrant returns to his despotic ways after being given control over a simulated city."