How ChatGPT parodied “Kubla Khan” and pwned DJT45 at the same time

Prelude

Man, if you can’t have more fun than a barrel of monkeys while playing with ChatGPT, then you aren’t human. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think ChatGPT means that we’re well on the way to AGI, much less to being ruled by Rogue AIs that make Atilla the Hun look like Shirley Temple. Nothing like that.

I don’t know what kind of thing ChatGPT is. It surely isn’t your cranky Uncle Roger’s AI, nor Uncle Marvin’s either. And it isn’t a million drunken chimps banging away on a gaggle of antique Underwoods either. It’s something else. The AGI-is-coming people and the only-stats-on-steroids people are making two versions of the same mistake. They’re trying assimilate ChatGPT, and its kith and kin, to things we understand. We understand stats on steroids, and science fiction has given us examples homicidal computers.

But ChatGPT isn’t either one of those. What is it? And what, by the way, are we?

Don’t you think we should make a serious attempt to find out?

Let’s write a poem

So...poetry has long been a standard category of things AI does. I decided to give it a whirl. Rather than asking ChatGPT to write a poem based on some more or less arbitrary word contraption I dropped on it, I decided to ask it for a parody of a well-known poem. Here’s the result:

Me: Would you write a parody of “Kubla Khan”.

ChatGPT: Sure, here's a parody of "Kubla Khan" that I came up with:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea

But alas, poor Kubla Khan
His pleasure dome was but a scam
He hired some guy named Dave
To build it, but it was a cave
Now Kubla's left with nothing but shame

He tried to impress his guests
With marble walls and golden towers
But the whole thing was a mess
It collapsed in just a few hours

Now Kubla's left to face the test
Of explaining to his friends
Why his fancy palace came to naught
He'll have to make amends
Or be forever ridiculed and caught
In the web of his own foolish ends.

Now, I suppose you can assert that it’s not much of a parody. It repeats the first stanza verbatim, doesn’t capture “Kubla Khan's” form at all, and pretty much ignores most of the poem: What of the fountain and the damsel with a dulcimer? They’re not reflected in the parody in any way.

But, you know, I don’t care. I like what ChatGPT did. I like that some “guy named Dave” did the work, and the rhyme isn’t bad.

So I asked it to “try again” (a term of art).

Pwning Donald Trump

Here’s what ChatGPT came up with:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where wrinkled old men played golf and tan
And maidens danced in bikinis

With a river rushing through the land
And a clubhouse built with care
Where the men could sip their beer on demand
And tell stories of their golfing flair

But alas, the dome was not to last
For the old men lost their energy and zest
And the maidens found a better place to dance and have a blast
Leaving the old men to their lonely quest

For a stately pleasure dome no more
Xanadu was just a golf course
Where the old men played in vain, but never a bore
And the maidens went off to find a better source.

I sensed a stirring in the Force, and gave it another prompt:

Sounds like Donald Trump's version of “Kubla Khan.”

Indeed it does, a pleasure dome filled with old men and scantily clad women, a sign of excess and opulence.

Wonderful. You're a poet and don't know it...or do you?

I am indeed a poet and am always happy to share my words with others. Thank you for the compliment!

You know, somewhere out there on the web there is a page that shows the design Trump commissioned for a Xanadu hotel in Las Vegas. And there’s this book, from 2020, Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America’s Xanadu. Those sites clearly link Trump with Xanadu and hence with “Kubla Khan.” And here’s an article from 2012 in which Trump says that Citizen Kane is his favorite movie. As we all known, the mansion in that film was called “Xanadu” and the first five lines of the poem were recited early in the film.

I note finally that well over a decade ago I did an informal study of the distribution of “Xanadu” on the web, which would have been much smaller then than it is now: One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme. While it turned up in various contexts, there were two major ones. One was high tech, which I called the cybernetic cluster, while the other was associated with luxury and excess, the sybaritic cluster.

I don’t know whether how those pages were in the corpus ChatGPT was trained on – many of them surely were, but there certainly is an attraction between DJT and the sybaritic cluster.