I’ve been reading a couple of short fables today and sort of falling in love with fables all over again. The same economy of language possessed by poets, but delivered in a totally different way. I love poetry, but I don’t think I’m quite smart enough to interpret much of it easily. Fables, like poems, come from noticing, and similarly deliver messages with beauty.
Something that makes me feel sort of icky is the idea of AI writing for me, but I’m also eager to see what happens when it does, or at least when it transforms something I’ve written in unexpected ways. I don’t really want to say “write me a story” and expect it to do so from whole cloth, but I want to say “take all this writing and do something with it.”
This evening, I asked Codex to read many of the posts on this blog, and to write a short fable based on them. After reading a number of the posts, it wrote the below. I’m going to paste it verbatim and sit with it for a minute. I’m telling you that it was written by AI, based on these hundreds of posts, and I’ll let you sit with it, too. You can judge it yourself.
The Wren Who Wanted a Song
A young wren wished to sing a song that the whole forest would remember.
She bought the finest silver listening horn and carried it everywhere. Through it, she heard rain settling on leaves, beetles beneath bark, and the low trembling of branches before the wind arrived.
“These sounds will make my song important,” she thought.
Each evening, she shaped a little clay cup and sang the day’s sounds into it. Most cups cracked. Some songs were dull. Others sounded beautiful until morning, when they seemed ordinary again.
Still, every day, she listened. Every evening, she made another cup.
Years later, a traveler passed through the forest and heard the wren singing while she worked. He stopped, suddenly remembering a rainy afternoon from his childhood.
“What marvelous instrument taught you that song?” he asked.
The wren considered her silver horn, her shelves of imperfect cups, and the window through which she had watched a thousand ordinary days.
“The horn taught me to notice,” she said. “The clay taught me to wait. But returning every day taught me what mattered.”