In one example, American poet Andrew Brown asked the software to take the perspective of a cloud gazing down on two warring cities. GPT-3 delivered a rhyming po

In one example, American poet Andrew Brown asked the software to take the perspective of a cloud gazing down on two warring cities. GPT-3 delivered a rhyming poem that began, not uncharmingly, with “I think I’ll start to rain.” Stephen Marche, writing an article for The New Yorker, assigned GPT-3 maybe the trippiest poem in the English canon: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fifty-four-line “Kubla Khan”—an opium dream interrupted in the middle of its composition in 1797 and never completed. GPT-3’s mission? Finish the fragment. What the program fantasized was so sophisticated (“The tumult ceased, the clouds were torn, / The moon resumed her solemn course”) that readers unfamiliar with the original poem might have had a hard time discerning where Coleridge ended and the computer began. This is not robots writing poetry. This is poets using computers.