Artificial intelligence writes a sonnet about my vineyard

I write these posts myself.

My experiments asking an artificial intelligence program to write a post for me have been unsatisfactory, even as a first draft. 

They seem to me to be like Wonder Bread: empty calories. Experimental posts sound knowledgeable, but they don't make clear arguments that are persuasive to me. Or maybe the real problem for me is that they don't sound like me to my own ear, and I am vain. In any case, I write these blog posts the old-fashioned way.

I am going to keep experimenting. Ten years from now we may think that the most important life skill people need to learn is how to write a good prompt, a key, I think, to successful use of AI as a tool. I am doing what children do to find out about the world: play. I goof around, trying to learn what it can do. You can use several AI programs for free, up to a limited amount. I just subscribed to claude.ai for $20/month, so that I could have all the practice I have time for.

Today will be an untypical post, about AI, not politics. I want to be at my vineyard early today, by 6 a.m. if possible, to beat the heat, so I am dashing this off. My grandnephew, Liam, who is staying at the farmhouse this summer, will have started work at 6. I will join him working through the rows, doing the maintenance tasks of a vineyard in this part of the summer: tucking vines into the wires, clipping unruly vines, checking the plants for water, removing leaves from in front of the grapes on the east side of the row, and looking for the noxious puncture-vine weed. Here is what we looked like yesterday at noon.

So today's post is a quick report on my AI play. I first asked ChatGPT to write a sonnet. I wanted to challenge it on issues of tone so I described my own situation, I am the fourth generation on a farm, but like most landowners of rural land lacking heirs who want to farm. I am not surprised. Wanting to do professional work "in town" shows good judgment on their part. It is hard to make a living working on a farm, and much farmwork is hard, uncomfortable, dirty, sweaty, and tedious. I thought I would see if AI programs could communicate a nuanced emotion about my situation as well as I could. 

The answer is yes.

Note that I am polite in my prompt, saying "please" to a piece of software, which is silly. I anthropomorphize the AI program because it seems so human in its interactions.

My prompt:
Please write a sonnet in the classic Shakespearean form reflecting the thoughts of a 76 year old man planting a vineyard, knowing that the grapes, and eventually the wine, will be enjoyed by people he won't know, long after he is gone. He reflects that he has no heirs who would want to own or manage the vineyard. But the wine will be a legacy of a sort. The man is a bit somber, but ok with that outcome.

Here is how ChatGPT responded, within two seconds:

Upon this slope I set the tender vine,
Though I shall never taste its fullest grace;
The clusters yet unborn, the future wine,
Will ripen for another time and place.
No eager child stands waiting for this land,
No heir will walk these rows when I am gone;
No blood of mine will guide a weathered hand
To greet the dew and watch the coming dawn.
At seventy-six, I know the seasons' claim;
The frost, the sun, the harvest, and decline.
Yet still I bend to earth and stake each frame,
Entrusting years beyond the reach of mine. 

Though none may speak my name when corks are drawn,
My vintage shall endure when I am gone.

I doubt if I could have written that sonnet, but if I tried, it would have been a labor of many hours. Possibly a reader with well-developed taste in literature or poetry thinks the sonnet poor in quality, but to my mind it is quite good. Or at least for most purposes, good enough, and a better use of my time than laboring for days to try to duplicate it.

I wondered what the AI program Claude would do. I gave it the identical prompt. In two seconds this emerged:

These vines I press to earth with aging hands
Will never yield their fruit to eyes of mine;
The harvest waits for those in distant lands
Of time, who'll lift a glass of unknown wine.

No son stoops here beside me in the row,
No daughter asks the names of root and cane;
The ones I loved have other fields to sow,
And so I work this dark and patient plain.

Yet something in the soil will hold my name—
Not written, but pressed deep in root and stone,
In tannin, in the color of the flame
That warms a stranger's glass when I am gone.

    I plant not for myself, nor blood, nor kin—
    But for the joy that I was ever in.

I am amazed by this one, too. A sonnet in perfect form and rhyme pattern, done instantly! My criticism of the two poems is essentially criticism of my prompt. The two poems hit the issue of not having heirs who want to farm harder than I really feel, but that is on me, not AI. My prompt mentioned that issue, not how much I enjoy the farm, so, it gave me what I said I wanted.

It is 5:38 a.m. and I am going out the door, leaving a realm of ideas, information, and abstractions to enter another realm: real life. Vineyards are plants growing in dirt. Real dirt, not the idea of dirt. I am a real, live person, who will have clippers in my hand. The vines are alive, green, leafy, and there are very young grapes on them. The baby grapes are in a  process of becoming, but I will deal with them existing as they are right now, this morning, not as they might be at harvest. The vineyard is here, now, physical, and real. 

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