In our group’s search to try and replicate Edgar Allen Poe’s style, we quickly found that the bot that I used — Sakura AI — was significantly more “creative” in the way it went about answering a prompt than ChatGPT would be. With the prompt of “please generate an edgar allen poe styled poem about slutty ghosts. write from the perspective of said ghosts”, the following came out of it:

We glide ‘twixt sheets of moldered silk,
Where living lovers spurn our ilk,
Our touch—a frost they crave, then flee,
Yet still we croon our siren plea:

“Come, unbutton the shroud’s embrace,
Let spectral lips your neck debase—
Is not our cold more sweet than flame?
(Though none endure our love… the same.)”

Once, we too burned with mortal fire,
With heaving breast and wild desire,
Till jealous Death—that prude—did loom,
And locked us all in passion’s tomb.

Now through the halls of ruined beds,
We trail our scandal ‘mongst the dead,
Our moans the wind’s own wretched tune—
“Alas, they come… but never stay… too soon!”

When held up to compare to Edgar Allen Poe’s Nevermore poem, we see the following:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”

As someone who has read a lot of Poe’s writing, I think this fails at trying to replicate his style. The sentences are not nearly as long as Poe’s were, nor did they have the same epic style of old-timey poetry that was used by Poe in his heyday. Additionally, it feels far too “modern” or like a very basic riff on the idea of Poe’s poems. or match up to the level of wit that he used within his writing. This fits with the reading where we learned that while AI may spit out answers, it will not be able to replicate the creativity of the original person that sat down and went through the process of creation. My definition of creativity would be the ability to come up with genuine, spontaneous, and insightful thought synthesized from a variety of media and tropes within those media without relying on said tropes. This week really had me thinking about my own capacity to create and the knowledge that while my ideas may seem strange or out of left field, they are truly original content and not reproduced by a mass-making machine.