If Great Dead Writers Were on Facebook - 5

When we think of great dead writers, we cannot of course leave out the great classical poets. I am not a poet myself and always struggle with writing poetry even in free verse. Well, I did get the haiku down, and there's a lot of various haiku on my profile here. Sometimes, I also get washed over by true inspiration or grief to churn out something reminiscent of poetry and even rhymed. But again, I am not a poet.

Therefore, I leaned into MAIK (My AI Kompanion, a name I gave to ChatGPT) to create this edition. To be perfectly clear, the prompts and ideas for these fake Facebook posts are entirely mine. I just couldn't put them into the appropriate form not only because I'm not a poet but also because as someone who learned these great poets' work first in translation, I don't have the feel or the ear for how this should sound.

Those of you who had been trained in classical English literature can assess the outcomes more critically, of course, but in my opinion MAIK did a great job mimicking their voices and style. You be the judge and make a comment:

1. Geoffrey Chaucer

We will start with the "father of the English literature." As an outsider, I was quite surprised that come experts believe that in the rankings of the great English poets he should be Number One, higher than Shakespeare. My favorite poem of his is "Truth" that shall set us free, or in Chaucer's words, "trouthe schal delyvere, it is no drede."

For these series, I asked MAIK to create a post where Chaucer, carried away by his creativity, is running out of ink to finish a ballad and is asking for help on Facebook to bring some ink to his home from Marketplace:

2. William Shakespeare

Is he the GOAT? - In my book, yes, and for that reason we cannot leave him out. I asked MAIK to write a Shakespeare's sonnet about Facebook, where the GOAT wonders about this new mysterious platform, "What is this new Facebook thing? I understand "face" and "book" but when they are put together to make one word? I do not understand it. But I will give it a try because my beloved asked me." Here's what MAIK came up with:

3. Lord Byron

Byron's Don Juan is something that is etched in my mind forever, so I asked MAIK to create a post where Don Juan wonders about the new function on Facebook, "I was just told that this Facebook thing has a dating service now, where I can meet women. Does anyone know how to use it?" I think MAIK produced something truly whimsical in the form of the Ottava Rima, an Italian stanza so favored in Don Juan:

Here are some general observations about this experiment: I had to ask MAIK to create the poem first, evaluate and tweak it, and then create the image. For some reason, doing everything at once is still a major challenge for MAIK and the poems get misspelled or jumbled often. I guess it's because the text and image generators are still not fully integrated. As MAIK explained, "sometimes the generator struggles with longer text blocks, especially verse, and it ends up garbling or truncating lines." So patience and multiple attempts are required but overall the results are not that bad.

Thank you for reading and please let me know what you think about it.