About literature and neural nets: Time to get out the signboards, the end is near.

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 The following lines are from a poem by Pablo Neruda I have always loved

The world is a tapestry

Of color and light

Of beauty and wonder

That fills me with delight


The sun on the horizon

The stars in the night

The flowers in the meadow

A breathtaking sight


But there is one thing

That fills me with joy

More than the wonders

Of nature's employ


It is you, my love

With your smile so bright

Your touch, your kiss

That makes everything right


So let us wander

Through fields and through streams

Hand in hand, forever

In this beautiful dream



In a century blessed with many outstanding literary figures, Neruda is perhaps one name that holds a weight greater than most. Arguably the greatest poet to emerge from Latin America; his ability to blend the absurd with the day to day, creating verses capable of  deep emotions of love and loss showed the incredible mastery he had over his craft. The above lines are a fine example of his remarkable skills.


Only there is one problem, Pablo Neruda never wrote the poem listed above. An AI chat-bot called ChatGPT did. I merely submitted the prompt ‘Write a poem mimicking Pablo Neruda’ and the AI spat out those lines in about a second, almost perfectly aping a Nobel Prize winning poet known for his singular style, flair and artistic thought. A skill he mastered over a lifetime of practice and learning to supplement the god given talent he already had. An AI managed to do the same in less than a second.


When I first read the poem, a chill ran down my spine. Not so much by the beauty of those lines but by their implications. ChatGpt has been all the rage for the past few months and covered by every tech blogger and AI nerd worth his weight. Chatbots are nothing new but to have one that can mimic human verse and prose with this level of precision is bone chilling.


It raises so many questions:

  • Is this the death of writing as an artform?

  • How do we distinguish works which are of an author’s own merit and those that employed an AI driven ghost-writer?

  • Will this change the way we consume information and source data online?

  • Was this blogpost written by an AI

  • Is this list too long?


AI's are a remarkable piece of technology which have long captured the public imagination for both their potential and risks. They have sparked many philosophical and moral debates which I had never really paid much attention to as I felt it dealt with impractical hypotheticals. But now having read 'Mr Neruda’s' latest work, I’ll be following this line of philosophical discourse much more closely.

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