"It is April, After All"
Quoting The Waste Land to ChatGPT
I was hoping to write another post this week on AI and The Waste Land, but ran out of time. So instead I tried feeding ChatGPT a few questions from the poem to see how it would take them as ice-breakers. At the back of my mind was the famous occasion in 1964 when Groucho Marx met T.S. Eliot for dinner. Groucho later recalled how
apropos of practically nothing (and not with a bang but a whimper) I tossed in a quotation from The Waste Land […] Eliot smiled faintly — as though to say he was thoroughly familiar with his poems and didn’t need me to recite them.
The first answer below plays a pretty straight bat, though its fact-checking balance does remind me of John Ashbery’s mischievous remark: “‘April is the cruellest month’ — but it is April, after all”.
What happened next suggests conversational AI is learning fast… and I rather like it.
