Visiting the Poetic Mountaintop of AI (I)
A Garden Made of Water
On my second day of Spring Break 2023, I visited a place called the Water Garden on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, by myself. Initially, I was heading to the famous Santa Monica pier to watch the sea at sunset, but I was attracted by the name “Water Garden”, so I decided to take a look. I usually prefer to travel alone, because that gives me a much better atmosphere and environment to appreciate the beauty of nature and cultivate my creative writing.
This “garden” is actually a commercial office complex, not a traditional public park like Echo Park Lake. However, this campus was the most beautiful one I’d ever seen in Los Angeles, even surpassing the USC Village. There were several low-rise office buildings surrounded by landscaped gardens, outdoor seating areas, ponds, and fountains. It was an incredibly spacious yet quiet place. Although there were numerous tables and chairs for people to rest, no one was there, lending the garden an ancient and desolate air. You know, it seemed like the garden belonged to the past, but had been forsaken. Every once in a while, a person or two with a dog would pass by, and occasionally, birds would fly over the garden.
I remember sitting in front of an office building there, starting to write the following verses:
There was a garden made of water,
Making a sound from a past memory.
Neat trees are anxiously beckoning,
Quiet sunset is telling a familiar story.Merry birds are flying into the nightfall,
Awaiting the next Dawn calling weird trees.
Thinking about the unruly light,
Tranquil square is keeping up company.When is the phoenix calling?
Is that the same bird lost in yesterday?
The time has gone so fast,
Wait for him, just wait for him!He’s still on his way to the unknown.
At this moment everything has calmed down.
At this moment the time belongs to you.
Before the dream takes flight,
We shall find the purpose and homes.
As I was writing it, I was in a peaceful and relaxed state of mind, so I perceived and felt everything in an optimistic way. It was also dusk, so I said, “Merry birds are flying into the nightfall,” likening the time of nightfall to a destination where birds are heading. And the line “Is that the same bird lost in yesterday?” in the third stanza echoes a poem I wrote about a month before, titled “Journey to the Unknown”, portraying a lonesome bird that has been left behind fighting for victory and persisting on its journey. The bird actually embodies my own ideal spirit.
Of course, this is just the first draft. I usually make several very careful revisions to the depth of each word choice before I publish my final work, including adding rhyme to the poem. As you can see, the last stanza of this Water Garden poem even has non-symmetric 5 lines since I didn’t decide which of the two lines, “At this moment everything has calmed down” and “At this moment the time belongs to you”, to keep there.
As I sat there reading and trying to revise my draft, I had the idea to let a new popular AI-powered language model called ChatGPT modify my poem and see what it would produce. What was somewhat surprising, the result AI delivered truly exceeded my expectations:
In a water garden, still as glass
Echoes of a memory, like a looking glass
Neat trees lean in, eager and free
As the quiet sunset shares a tale with gleeMerry birds take flight, into the night
Awaiting dawn’s call, with all their might
Weird trees ponder, unruly light
As the tranquil square keeps watch tonightWhen will the phoenix come to play
Is it the same bird, lost in yesterday
Time has flown, oh so fast
But wait for him, he’ll come at lastEverything now is calm and still
Time stands still, as if by will
Before the dreams begin to soar
Find their purpose, find their shore
I had to admit that this revised poem was much better than my original. And it perfectly combined all my poetic imagery and even the state of mood and emotions I put into its work, in a much more poetic way and perfect rhyme. I was fascinated by this AI platform. In the end, I didn’t really make many more revisions (except for the following ones) before publishing this revised work, because I didn’t think there was anything else I could improve.
In the first two lines, I originally wrote “There was a garden made of water, Making a sound from a past memory.” I personally find “a garden made of water” more poetically appealing, creating an illusory atmosphere. But the AI-revised version “In a water garden, still as glass / Echoes of a memory, like a looking glass” directly changed that to “water garden” which didn’t preserve that kind of subtle illusion. But that’s okay, since that’s the name of the garden, so I didn’t change it back or to something more poetic. But I really didn’t like the simile of “a memory” and “a looking glass” in its second line. At least, that’s not what I intended to express when I wrote the poem. I just wanted to convey that the illusory atmosphere evoked many of my memories. So I asked GPT to rewrite the first two lines based on my original, and here’s its response:
Reflecting in the water’s mass
A memory echoes from the past
I didn’t like the new first line, did you? The second was okay, albeit a bit ordinary. So by comparison, I still used the first revised version, but I changed “like a looking glass” in the second line to “like a fleeting flash” to sort of make up for the deficiency of illusion.
Then, when I read the first two lines in the last stanza: “Everything now is calm and still / Time stands still, as if by will”, I didn’t like the flow there. Since “everything” is “calm and still”, I don’t need to particularly emphasize that “time” is also “still”. Of course, repetition or parallelism is a great rhetorical device that I like using very much, but here it somehow doesn’t sound cool. So, I replaced “Time stands still” with a more captivating repetition “Time freezes time”. That even added a more romantic and illusory atmosphere, which is essentially the theme of this poem. Thus, the final work has been completed:
Water Garden
In a water garden, still as glass
Echoes of a memory, like a fleeting flash
Neat trees lean in, eager and free
As the quiet sunset shares a tale with gleeMerry birds take flight, into the night
Awaiting dawn’s call, with all their might
Weird trees ponder, unruly light
As the tranquil square keeps watch tonightWhen will the phoenix come to play
Is it the same bird, lost in yesterday
Time has flown, oh so fast
But wait for him, he’ll come at lastEverything now is calm and still
Time freezes time, as if by will
Before the dreams begin to soar
Find their purpose, find their shore3/12/2023
Santa Monica Water Garden
After that, I took another advantage of AI: I had my cloned voice read this poem and uploaded it to my YouTube channel. The AI-cloned voice was generated by Play.ht from my real voice. I could have it read anything I typed in my cloned voice. I like reading and recording my poems or any poems myself, but doesn’t having AI with my voice read it sound much cooler? That was actually the first time I used my cloned voice to read something there, and I was super surprised by its product. It sounded exactly like I’m reading it. In addition, I just learned to use iMovie on my iPad. (It would be more fitting and perfect if iMovie were also powered by AI.) So, here is the video I made using iMovie for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH0Y754NLDQ&list=PL5Ir6_ZFOgX9jjBgP8NIBjmXShav_TC8S&index=7
As I mentioned, I originally planned to directly visit the Santa Monica pier, so after publishing this poem, as the last two lines said: “Before the dreams begin to soar / Find their purpose, find their shore”, the very next moment, I embarked on a new journey to find the distant shore.
Ivan Zhanhu Feng
July 21, 2023
Last update: July 28, 2023
