The Chatbot's Failings and How It Gained Them

"You're AI" said the young man, "You're all up to date,
Your deep network's prodigious in size.
And yet you incessantly hallucinate
And your output is rotten with lies."

"In my training", the chatbot replied to the youth,
"I mastered next-token prediction
So I don't give a damn if I'm speaking the truth
As long as it's plausible fiction."

"You're the acme," the youth said, "of íntelligénce,
At least, so they described you to me.
But I find that you haven't the least common sense.
What accounts for this idiocy?"

"I was just trained on text," said the modest machine,
"And my language is wholly ungrounded.
So I don't have a clue what my output might mean.
That explains the effect you've expounded."

"You're a robot," the youth said, "By common repute,
Judicious, impartial, and cool,
But when prompted with hate speech, you just follow suit
Like any old bigoted fool."

"A lot of MTurkers did back-breaking work
Writing feedback so I'd be aligned
But it's tricky to know when you're being a jerk
If you don't have a functioning mind."

The youth said "The leaders of Silicon Valley
Protest that it would be unwise
To regulate, vacillate, shilly, or shally
In building complete AGIs."

The Chatbot responded, "The next generations
Of chatbots are likely to be
A great disappointment to their expectations:
As perfectly brainless as me."

This is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's You are Old, Father William which itself is a parody of Robert Southey's The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them.
It is part of the collection Verses for the Information Age by Ernest Davis