Chatbot Shakespeare

Can you identify the play from which the following soliloquy fragment was drawn?

“…Oh, what a tangled web
Is this, that I am caught in, with no way to ebb
The tide of fate that bears me on its crest
To what unknown and fateful end?...”

Sound at all familiar? How about this:

 “…Shall I be doomed, as are all living things
To suffer pain, and sorrow, and the stings
Of mortal coil? …”

If this pains you, it’s because you’re human and love the poetry of beautiful words put together in a way that allows them to resound with both music and meaning. Of course, there’s something wrong in the lines above, though one can’t help but wonder how a mortal coil might sting. The image conjured up, at least for me, is of a creature part snake (coil), part scorpion (painful sting), and part honeybee (casts off its mortal coil upon inflicting painful sting). There’s just enough of Hamlet here to give a reader pause and to make her lean over to the bookcase. How did that speech go?

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them.” (Hamlet, III, I, 55)

Ah, that’s better. Of course, no one can write like Shakespeare, even now four hundred years after his death. Not a person. And, thankfully, not a chatbot—not yet. The above “soliloquy” fragments were composed by a chatbot, ChatGPT, in the course of an “interview” with New Yorker–journalist Andrew Marantz (from whose recent article I’ve extracted the soliloquy fragments).

You probably know what a chatbot is. I didn’t know for sure and had to look it up. Apparently Siri (on your iPhone) and Alexa (who’ll buy stuff for you at Amazon or play you music) are both chatbots—a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that interacts with customers via natural language, i.e. talk or text. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, “a chatbot is a computer program designed to have a conversation with a human being, especially over the internet.”

So chatbots can have conversations. They can also compose Shakespearean soliloquys. Sort of. Bad soliloquys. Somewhat clumsy rip-offs, that don’t quite come off. But they’re getting smarter, more intelligent, all the time. There’s no telling what they’ll be capable of. And the pace of AI evolution seems to be speeding up. Futurism.com, among others, has said that AI will bring about the “biggest transformation in human history,” a development with consequences far greater than other revolutionary steps in the history of human progress, including the intentional use of fire, the invention of agriculture, the industrial revolution, and the invention of computers.

I can’t help but wonder, if AI does progress to the extent that it is able to create great literature (I understand it is already writing convincing term papers), and all by itself—or in response to a spoken or typed or tapped request from a human—what might an AI Shakespeare look like? What kind of stories would that writer tell? Would they be a mélange of what it knows from all our gazillions of books, fed into its infinite databases? Or would it be something else entirely, the product of its own unique experience of existence? A literature of light that will describe worlds of which we do not even dream? 

The featured image, called forth from the void by the type-written prompt “Shakespeare as Chatbot,” is AI-generated artwork, in low resolution, made on nightcafe.studio.