Aum Golly: Poems on Humanity by an Artificial Intelligence

By Jukka Aalho and GPT-3

What does AI know about love, happiness and making a difference?

Aum Golly is a book of poems written in 24 hours. It was made possible by GPT-3 – an advanced autoregressive language model published in 2020 by OpenAI.

"... a collection that surprises with humor and delicateness..."
– Goodreads review

"... I have to say reading it was a pleasure..."
– Finnish radio host Ruben Stiller on Yle

"... a beautiful dialogue between man and machine..."
– a review of the Finnish audiobook

The deep learning model can generate text that is virtually indistinguishable from text written by humans: poems, recipes, summaries, legal text and even pieces of code. GPT-3 is autofill on steroids.

Good poetry makes us feel something and see the world differently. Despite the gut reaction some of us may have towards AI-enhanced creativity, Aum Golly is a book like any other. You will love some of the poems. You will hate others. Some will make you wonder, but all of them will make you think.

Award-winning writer and TEDx speaker Jukka Aalho has guided the AI and chosen the poems for the collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kertojan ääni
• Release date: Oct 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9789527397220

Book preview

Jukka Aalho & GPT-3

Aum Golly

poems on humanity by an artificial intelligence

Kertojan ääni

Oulu 2021

© Jukka Aalho

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact [e-mail]. Originally published in Finnish by Basam Books.

ISBN 978-952-7397-22-0 (ebook)

Cover design: Jukka Aalho

Cover art: Artbreeder

Cover design for the Finnish paperback: Taivo Org, Küpress OÜ

Finnish paperback published by Basam Books

Kertojan ääni 2021

For Essi

#GoodThingsWillCome

Foreword

Aum Golly is a creative collaboration between artificial intelligence and man. GPT-3 is an autoregressive language model released in 2020 by OpenAI, based in San Francisco. I am a human, born in Oulu, Finland, in 1986.

GPT-3 has written all the poems in this book, using the bold parts of the verses, i.e. the prompts. Poems written by artificial intelligence have been changed only in terms of line breaks and punctuation. I have written the prompts, selected the poems to be included in the work, and I'm responsible for the content.

The themes of the book were created using this prompt and response:

The 3 most important themes for us modern humans right now are:

1. The need to be happy.

2. The need to be loved.

3. The need to be make a difference.

The title of the work was born