Love Letters, written by a Toaster.

The poetic power of Artificial Intelligence (GPT-3)

Merzmensch
Merzazine
Published in
18 min readJul 27, 2020

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Photo: Merzmensch

Why do people write love letters? To communicate their feeling, being separated in time and space? To keep the fragile thread of empathy across the Universe? Or to see themselves in the mirror of amorousness and infatuation? Do they write for the loved one or for themselves?

Why AI writes love letters? Because I told AI to do it. Am I a dictator of feelings? Is a writer writing prompts within an AI Natural Language Processing a tyrant? And why should he do this, knowing that AI has no feelings? Doesn’t it?

GPT-3 is fascinating. We’ve seen how far can GPT-3 go being a chatbot — in ontological discourses, or in personal self-discovery. Experimenting with literary power of GPT-3, I constructing the exercise, probably included in Creative Writing 101:

Define a narrator. 
Write a love letter considering the personality of the narrator.

Surprisingly, GPT-3 can precisely fulfill this demand. I mean, an AI model, fulfilling demands like probability calculation or object recognition, should be precise and is nothing new. But love letters? A tweet by Helen Ngo inspired me for this experiment:

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Merzmensch
Merzazine

Futurist. AI-driven Dadaist. Living in Germany, loving Japan, AI, mysteries, books, and stuff. Writing since 2017 about creative use of AI.