Teaching teenagers made me immediately aware of generative AI: two days after ChatGPT1 launched, I read a homework essay it had written. Like many who make a living with words, I quickly came to see LLMs as – at best – an irritant and, increasingly, as an existential enemy. However, since they appear to be going nowhere, I decided to attempt to use one for something creatively interesting. Using a series of increasingly complex prompts, I persuaded GPT4 to (genuinely) collaborate with me in writing a Shakespearean sonnet sequence, diaglogue-style. The resulting poems explore urgent contemporary questions of cognition, creativity, and consciousness.
