Metaphorical Moats, Moats of Mind: Turning Chat GpT Into A Poet

Matthew Oldridge
4 min readFeb 6, 2024
Metaphorical Moats of Mind. Oldridge x Dall E

Early in its poetic training, and far before it came up with its own theory of mind and its own poesies- Chat GpT wrote this poem:

“In the realm of imagination,

where dreams take wing,

Stands a castle, majestic,

built by the Wordsmith’s string.”

Electrons at work, new technology at work, and this is what I get? Improve this right now. A poet’s job is to find new connections between things. With my tongue I paint the world into being. With my voice I breathe the world and all things in it. I have heard the invocation to “make it new”.

The prediction engine needs help making new things, whereas I can jam jarring images together like cows & crowbars, dams & prescription drugs. I can put a hunk of twisted rusty metal in my soup, make maple trees rain tears.

Make it new. A prediction engine with it’s vast corpus of works read and not understood, word by word associativity-

Improve the poem above. Make it more descriptive.

In the ethereal expanse of imagination’s embrace, Where dreams unfurl their wings with grace, A fortress emerges, majestic and grand, Woven by the Wordsmith’s skillful hand.

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Matthew Oldridge

Writing about creativity, books, productivity, education, particularly mathematics, music, and whatever else “catches my mind”. ~Thinking about things~