8-Bit Poems


Reading And Writing Electronic Text
Python / NLP / GPT / Research / AIGC / Machine Learning
Spring 2023, New York.


OVERVIEW


In this delightful experiment,I write poems with Python. Code births harmonious chaos, evoking unforeseen emotions and untamed connections. Once the groundwork is set, I let randomness and chance take over, surprising me with every line.


I. Unforeseen



This piece draws inspiration from Richard Brautigan, particularly his work The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster.

"When you take your pill
it’s like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you."

I find it fascinating how seemingly unrelated elements can be intertwined, so I attempted to replicate this feeling by listing random words.

Code Link



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II. Morning Mosaic



In this composition, I intertwine two text materials: Ode on Dictionaries by Barbara Hamby and a collection of chatGPT generated TV dialogue encompassing weather forecasts, news, variety shows, and more.

" ...
the current rave in the fundamentalist landscape
disguised as her brain, a rococo lexicon
of Deuteronomy, Job, gossip, spritz, and neocon
ephemera all wrapped up in a pop burrito
of movie star shenanigans, like a stray Cheeto
found in your pocket the day after you finish the bag,
tastier than any oyster and champagne fueled fugue
gastronomique you have been pursuing in France
for the past four months. This 82-year-old's rants
have taken their place with the dictionary I bought
...”

Through this fusion, I aim to depict the leisurely morning scene of watching TV, continuously flicking through channels with mundane programs, drifting into contemplation, and playing a mental game of sentence solitaire—where each sentence's last alphabet ignites the creation of the next, weaving a tapestry of thoughts, embodying the stream of consciousness experience.

Code Link



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III. Hey, ERROR



This endeavor entailed infusing humor and cuteness into program error reporting. Drawing inspiration from Python's error reporting format, I ventured to combine it with the endearing content found in children's picture books, creating a delightful amalgamation of cute error messages. The format adopted for these error messages follows:

[]Error:

[Error Message][Description of the error, including any relevant information such as the invalid input value]

[Suggestions for resolving the error or troubleshooting steps to take]

Taking cues from real error messages within Jupyter Notebook, this project endeavors to turn the typically crushing experience of encountering errors into a joyous and whimsical journey.

Code Link I

I also crafted an interactive version, integrating a prompt and a factor ahead of the file, which would adeptly influence the content's meaning, aligning it harmoniously with the given prompt.

Code Link II

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IV. Sorce Code Is Poetry



It explores the poetic dimension of code, where variables predominantly take the form of nouns and function names embody verbs. Inspired by this notion, I embarked on a poetic coding endeavor, seeking to generate code that resembles poetry. The process involved two main steps:

1. Randomly generating concise source code poems using words from the Gutenberg Poetry corpus.

2. Utilizing user input prompts to find similar sentences in the 20th Century love poems corpus. These sentences served as prompts for a fine-tuned GPT2 model, generating paragraphs. I then extracted nouns and verbs from the paragraph to compose the final source code poem.

Though currently limited to generating short code poems, my vision for the future is to create a website enabling the crafting of code poems with specific functions and performance in mind. 

Code Link



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