Kiran Balakrishna

I loathe AI because it is way smarter than me, which essentially implies I'm abhorrent of the majority of humans on earth! 🙂

But say what - these AI tools are getting more and more cunning and smarter by the day and go to any extent to please their conversing buddy.
Here's why I'm saying this:

Certain incidents, events , people, books you've read, albeit even if it's a small book or a paragraph you might have read in it, however insignificant they may be, remain etched in your memory forever, for no reason. One such memory of mine involved a recital of a high school poem by my English teacher. It was probably in my 8th standard. It was such a wonderful rendition by my teacher that the characters of the poem, the settings, the events in it stuck with me forever. There were tons of other lessons and poems and other childhood memories, but why did this one particular reading have to get etched in my memory is beyond my comprehension.

Days, weeks, years and then decades passed by but I could not forget the vivid imagery of this poem. I forgot the name, I forgot the poet and I forgot in which class I read the poem. All I could remember after all these years was the reading by my teacher and smithereens of imagery from the poem. I was living the character of the poem. Over 25 years later, this is all I could remember of the poem:

"𝑨 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒈 𝒃𝒐𝒚, 𝒘𝒉𝒐, 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒆 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒗𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝒂 𝒅𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒚 𝒓𝒐𝒂𝒅, 𝒇𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒔 𝒂 𝒔𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆𝒂𝒖𝒕𝒊𝒇𝒖𝒍 𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒂 𝒍𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒈𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒆𝒏, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒎𝒆𝒆𝒕𝒔 𝒂𝒏 𝒐𝒍𝒅 𝒍𝒂𝒅𝒚 𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒐 𝒐𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒉𝒊𝒎 𝒄𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒄𝒐𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒆"

Umpteen number of google searches with infinite combinations of the above text of the imagery in my mind could not bring me back the happiness of my childhood. This is where ChatGPT AI came to help and it was as though the entire universe contrived together to search this poem for me. I squeezed ChatGPT's brain fluid to its last drop until it finally unearthed it. It retrieved this poem from a literary critic blog buried deep underground in underbellies of the Internet. The poem is "It was long ago", by the early 20th century English children's poet Eleanor Farjeon, in which she gets nostalgic about a childhood memory where she was offered Bilberries and cream by an elderly woman while travelling along a dusty countryside road.

However, here's the funny ( or rather should we say scary! ) part: I started the same chat with DeepSeek, Gemini and Perplexity. To my perplexity, each one of the tools created their own creative version of the poem while the Poet's name and the poem's name were right. I don't know if these different versions of the poem were indeed authored by the same writer or if it were just figments of imagination of these tools! 🙄