Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to have garnered the interest of the entire world since the launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT. The chatbot has garnered over 100 million users in only two months — a statistic that speaks louder than words do.
In an effort to have fun and educate the public about the uses and capabilities of this technology, especially as Valentine’s season rolls around, Vanderbilt professors and students, the Data Science Institute and other organizations partnered to create an event to immerse attendees into some of the possible capabilities of AI at the Rand Lounge on Feb. 9.
This cleverly named campus event had it all: speakers reading romantic poetry live from an array of languages, data scientists present to explain and expand on ChatGPT and AI, artificially designed custom temporary tattoos printed on the spot and a chocolate fountain. I mean, who could say no to a chocolate fountain?
The first activity I tried at [A]I Heart You was writing love poems with ChatGPT. By correctly phrasing the question, a user can get the chatbot to write a beautiful poem — and not just in English. Though ChatGPT was trained mostly in English during its development, I still found great success in asking it to generate grandiose poems in foreign languages. For example, after simply asking ChatGPT to “write a love poem in Spanish to a friend who has always been there when I needed them,” I received:
Mi amigo fiel, mi compañero,
mi confidente y mi apoyo,
eres mi sol en los días grises,
mi brisa fresca en los calurosos días.
Eres mi risa en los momentos tristes,
mi mano amiga en los momentos difíciles,
mi oído atento en los momentos de confusión,
mi corazón en los momentos de soledad.
Eres mi amigo en todo momento,
mi confidente en los secretos,
mi confidente en las alegrías,
mi confidente en las tristezas.
Eres mi amigo incondicional,
alguien en quien puedo confiar,
alguien a quien puedo amar,
alguien que siempre está ahí.
Te agradezco por ser mi amigo,
por estar a mi lado siempre,
por ser mi luz en la oscuridad,
por ser mi amor verdadero.
Te quiero con todo mi corazón,
por siempre y para siempre,
eres mi amigo, mi confidente,
mi compañero de vida eterna
(Jorie Fawcett)
ChatGPT can also generate text in the style of other poets and authors. I could literally spend hours playing with this feature. Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Sylvia Plath, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling and William Shakespeare were some of the famous authors whose styles people mentioned emulating at the event.
Granted, the aforementioned feature was a little cheesy at times. When asking ChatGPT to write a love poem for a significant other in the style of Shakespeare, one part of a stanza stated “Like Juliet, to her Romeo, I am yours, and you are mine, don’t you know.” The Romeo and Juliet name drop came out a little unoriginal, yet I still feel that ChatGPT got the gist of capturing romance in a Shakespearean manner excellently in the rest of the poem.
While playing around with ChatGPT, I felt as if the charcoal of my own creativity was sparked. It truly seems that you could use it to send poems to your loved ones, no matter the language barrier.
At [A]I Heart You, attendees also had the opportunity to print out custom, AI-generated temporary tattoos. To do this, they used another AI system called DALL·E 2 — which can create an image of whatever the user asks it to. Simply even staring at the photos that appear on the front page of the DALL·E 2 website is like entering a futuristic art gallery from another universe.
I passed by an attendee with an incredible temporary tattoo of Godzilla riding a unicycle, which I think sums up the unique potential spawned from this innovation.
There is evidently a lot of potential with this technology — not only on Valentine’s Day but every day. Some Vanderbilt professors have already begun incorporating ChatGPT into their assignments, and businesses around the world are using AI to support themselves and innovate. [A]I Heart You certainly achieved what it set out to do: represent the direction that society will take, with a fun romantic spin.
