Comparing a ChatGPT poem "in the style of" a poet to a real poem by that poet, not to slag on chatbots, but to demonstrate some of the things that make good poetry good. A thread.

#PoetryClass Now, if you play with ChatGPT and poetry at all, you'll find that it really really likes to make poems rhyme, even when you tell it not to. So in order to make a more interesting comparison I'm going to choose a poet who is very rhymey: A. A. Milne.

Ok let's talk about Malory again. I said in a previous thread that there are two main sources for Malory's Morte Darthur. One is Caxton's print edition, published in 1485 and for centuries the oldest known version of the text; the other is the Winchester Manuscript, made sometime before 1485 but lost until 1934.

I'm going to actually respond to this in some detail, because I think it merits some real reflection.

1. The thing about don't lose the only copy of your dissertation is big and it's good advice. Your computer may die. Your laptop may get stolen. Do absolutely keep backups.

https://twitter.com/biodilarastro/status/1324109053220417536

I also strongly recommend a scrupulous filing system. Have the current draft somewhere, and all previous drafts labelled by date saved somewhere else. The first thing you do when you start work is save your old draft, dated, into the old draft place. Not the same place.

Ok let me just spitball here. "Outlaw" is not a homogenous category. It's sometimes a legislative category with defined parameters, but those parameters are not the same throughout all times and in all countries, and even within a particular time and place it's not always clear. I honestly don't know enough to say anything worth saying about outlawry as it ever existed in a real-world legal context. But I do know that as it is constructed imaginatively in fiction and fictionalized narratives, "outlaw" is a category of person outside the law's protection