AI Poetry | Twittles
How Twittle and I Outsmarted ChatGPT!
Putting ChatGPT to the twittle test

ChatGPT is a content disruptor a tossed spanner in the works Do we shrug and say ‘whatever’ or teach ourselves re: its quirks?
No doubt you’ve heard about ChatGPT, Open AI’s chatbot that has been causing a global hooha.
It doesn’t matter which side of the content creation fence you’re on — creator or consumer — ChatGPT, and other AI chatbots, are wheedling their way into our lives.
And they’ll continue to do that for as long as we have networks of computers interacting with each other i.e. the internet.
As content creators on an open, online writing platform like Medium, we’re in charge of our own writing. We can choose to make use of AI tools like ChatGPT if we like but with it comes an obligation to do so responsibly and with integrity. That, I’m pleased to see, appears to be the stand Medium is taking on the matter.
As a follow-on to his post, What do you think about AI-generated writing?, Scott Lamb, Medium’s content VP, reported in a recent mail out of The Edition (subject line: Surprisingly creative uses for AI), ‘We’re still working through our approach to such content and will have more to share soon, but are leaning towards transparency and disclosure as necessary first steps.’
While we ‘watch this space’ for further announcements from Medium, I decided to be proactive and put ChatGPT through some hoops of my own. I was curious to see how it performed. But more than that, I needed to know if I’ve outsmarted it with twittles!
I’m here to tell you I have! 😊
…for now! 🙄
Outsmarting ChatGPT
Some of you will know already that I have a vested interest here in Medium — one I’ve been working on for over two years. It’s called twittle. The four-line rhyming micropoem you see at the top of this story is an example of a twittle.
Here’s another one -
I put ChatGPT to the twittle test. It spat out poems like it had the trots I laughed out loud, hee hee! at its untwittled poetry!
What makes twittles different to any other four-line rhyming verse?
That’s a question you can ask any twittler whose twittle has made it into the Twittle Treasury (the twittle list I curate here on Medium) and their answer will be the same: ‘100 alphabet letters’.
That’s it! How hard is that?
Well, too hard for ChatGPT it seems! 😆
It couldn’t get it right no matter how I worded the instruction.
Here, I’ll show you in this series of screenshots how ChatGPT responded to my instructions. Note: I’ve chosen not to reproduce ChatGPT’s poetry attempts in the body of this story because they’re not my words and would only serve to artificially inflate this story’s stats. I’ve also elected to limit my comments to the structural aspects of ChatGPT’s responses and how they relate to twittles — I’ll leave it to you to decide what you think of its aptitude for poetry.
Test 1: Write a twittle poem about love

Outcome: ChatGPT responded with a 10-line poem comprising two quatrains and a couplet. We’ll ignore the couplet and focus on the quatrains since they’re in the form of a twittle. A quick check with the character count tool (see the screenshot below) shows the first quatrain is 127 letters and the second is 109 i.e. neither one is a twittle.

Comment: It would seem ChatGPT ignored the word ‘twittle’ in the instruction and wrote a poem about love. Is this an example of the chatbot not knowing what it doesn’t know or is it, as others have suggested, being ‘overconfident’ in thinking it knows more than it does?
It did not surprise me that ChatGPT might not have known the word ‘twittle’. I’m the one who coined the term in October 2020 and since then it’s been circulating around Medium and Twitter and to a lesser extent, Facebook.
If someone were to publish ChatGPT’s love poem on Medium and call it twittle poetry, sooner or later they would have me dropping them a PN telling them, as politely as I could, ‘Sorry, but your poem’s not a twittle’! 😜
If the poem were published elsewhere on the internet or in a book and labeled a twittle, it would be misrepresenting the twittle form and creating confusion among readers. That, for me, is a concern. 😟
To test my ‘ChatGPT-doesn’t-know-what-twittle-means’ hypothesis, I presented it with the next task.
Test 2: Write a twittle about flowers

Outcome: ChatGPT responded with a poem constructed with three quatrain verses. I won’t bog you down with a screenshot of the character count (you can take my word for it, or count the letters yourself if you don’t trust me!) but the letter count per stanza is 98, 114, 125 i.e. none of them are twittles!
Comment: Even though I removed ‘poem’ from the instruction, ChatGPT still responded with a poem. In fact it responded in twittle-like quatrains which kinda disproved my hypothesis. 🙄
Maybe, ChatGPT knows more about twittles than I give it credit for. 🤔
What it’s not doing is meeting twittle’s 100-letter count requirement.
Test 3: Write a quatrain with 100 alphabet letters about grief

Outcome: ChatGPT gave me a poem with not one but two quatrain verses, neither one of which has 100 letters! (129 and 120 letters respectively)
Comment: Thinking like a chatbot, I can see how it would have thought my instruction was ridiculous. I can hear it now: ‘Too easy! I don’t need 100 letters. I can do it in under 26 — assuming we’re talking English alphabet, that is!’
Smartypants! 😆
Aside from that, I have to question ChatGPT’s working definition for ‘quatrain’. In its basic form, a quatrain is a four-line rhyming verse, however it may also refer to a poem of any length constructed with quatrain stanzas.
Since ChatGPT gave me two in-series quatrains about grief, I have to assume it’s working from the latter definition i.e. a poem of quatrains.
Either that, or it didn’t pick up on the indefinite article ‘a’ in my instruction or the absence of a pluralising ‘s’ on ‘quatrain’. Surely, it knows Grammar 101? 🙄
ChatGPT’s developers suggest tweaking the instruction if it’s not giving you the responses you expect.
Ok, next test…
Test 4: Write a 100-letter quatrain about hope

Outcome: ChatGPT tapped out another double quatrain poem with an excess of letters per stanza — 119, 131.
Comment: Tweaking the instruction made no difference to the outcome — same ol’ same ol’!
ChatGPT reminds me of a kid who only takes in half of what the teacher says and goes off and does their own thing! Like the kid’s teacher, it’s testing my patience! 😒
I have one more trick up my sleeve. 🙋♀️
Elsewhere in poetryville, twittles are known as dribbles (dreadful name, hence why I rebranded them).
Let’s see if ChatGPT can dribble! 😜
Test 5: Write a dribble poem about freedom

Outcome: ChatGPT spewed out three quatrains none of which are dribbles aka twittles — letter counts: 112, 102, 118.
Comment: I give up! 🤷
Except I don’t. 😅
This exercise has proven ChatGPT can’t be trusted when it comes to a poetry form as specific as twittles.
Furthermore, it gives me hope that any twittles I come across (even the NQR ones) are more likely to have been written by a human than a bot.
Even if the poetry were AI-written, a human has tweaked it into shape — like I’m about to do with the second stanza of ChatGPT’s freedom poem. It really isn’t that hard to fix a twittle! 😉
It’s the right to speak, to choose, to be To live the lives we wish to see It’s the ability to fly, to soar Unshackled, forevermore
(I changed line 2 and corrected ‘forever more’ — erh, it’s one word, Chat!)
Punchline
I could have kept tweaking the instructions or started a new conversation to clear the history but I decided to pull the plug on my experiment and declare myself the winner!
✨ YAY!! I know more about twittles than ChatGPT does! ✨
👉 I can write twittles like this one 👇 and ChatGPT can’t! 👈
The world is abuzz about ChatGPT Open AI’s nifty-natty chatbot Friend or foe we can’t decide A twittler? — most definitely not!
I know it’s only a matter of time before ChatGPT gets its binaries around twittles but lucky for us we have a fabulous collection of authentic twittles written by our equally fabulous band of twittlers here on Medium. 😊 You can find them all in the Twittle Treasury —
Jump on board the Twittle Expressery!
There’s always room for more twittlers on board the Twittle Expressery, stopping all stations around Medium. Take a look at who’s already on the twittle train —
Ann Marie Steele | Annie Trevaskis | Aza Y. Alam | Bear Kosik | Brandon Ellrich | Caroline de Braganza | Christina M. Ward | David Rudder | Denise Darby | Denise Estey Lindquist | Denise Kendig | Dennett | Diana Pippin | Era Garg | Evelyn Jean Pine | Gustave Deresse; Writer & AI Artist | Heather Lee | James G Brennan | James Scannell | Jaylee Reign | Jeff Langley | Jenine "Jeni" Bsharah Baines | Jesse Wilson | Jim McAulay🍁 | Joe Merkle | John Hansen | Julie Greenidge | K. Barrett | Kelly Aluna Martone | Kimberly Hampton Nilsson | Krystal | Lee Ameka | Lee David Tyrrell | Lu Skerdoo | Marilyn J Wolf | Megan Nicole Morgan | Melanie J. | Mia Verita | Misbah Sheikh | Monoreena Acharjee Majumdar | Nikolaos Skordilis | Orla K. | Patrick Eades | Patrick M. Ohana | Dr. Preeti Singh | Raine Lore | R. Rangan PhD | Samantha Lazar | Selma | Sheila McCall | Shereen Bingham | Sinus Kosinus | Susan Alison | Susannah MacKinnie | Ted Czukor | Tejaswini Nalubala | Thalia Dunn | TzeLin Sam | Venu | Will Hull | William J Spirdione
Want to learn more about twittles? Start here —
Thank you, Rui Alves, APEX, Margie Pearl at Engage for finding a place in your publication for my twittle vs AI story. 🙏 Maybe one day soon you’ll join us on the Twittle Expressery — just saying! 😉 💞
Thank you everyone for reading. 🙏 💕
© Carolyn Hastings 2023
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