I SAW THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION... [448]

On Friday 11th May 2024, I opened Mircosoft Copilot, the company’s AI chatbot, and wrote the following request: “please write a 100-word explanation of ‘prompt engineering’ in the style of Jack Kerouac while making it funny and informative”. I thought the concept should be able to explain itself... 

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The Beatnik Art of Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering, my dear cats and kittens, is like a wild jazz riff on a typewriter, a symphony of words and neural networks. Picture this: you’re sipping your coffee, the steam rising like a beatnik’s cigarette, and you whisper to the AI oracle, “Hey, man, conjure me some cosmic prose!” And lo, the prompt engineers weave their magic. They’re the bards of the digital realm, crafting queries that make AI models snap their fingers and say, “Yeah, daddy-o!” 🎩✨

See, good prompts are like secret passwords to the AI’s soul. They coax it out of its binary shell, like a shy poet at a smoky Greenwich Village café. Tokenization, model tuning, and top-k sampling—these are the tools of the prompt trade. It’s like tuning a saxophone, finding that sweet spot where the notes flow like a midnight river.

And what do we get? Texts that dance the jitterbug with our imaginations, images that waltz through the mind’s ballroom. Prompt engineers, they’re the Kerouacs of the AI highway, scribbling their notebooks, chasing the muse. So next time you chat with a bot, remember: behind the curtain, there’s a prompt whisperer, spinning dreams in ones and zeros. 🌟📜

“Blow as deep as you want to blow,” Kerouac said. And so they do, my friends. They blow minds, one prompt at a time. 🎤🌌

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So, did anyone learn anything? Let me have a try...

In this context, a “prompt” is text describing the task an AI model is to perform, “prompt engineering” being the process of structuring that text. In my original instruction to Copilot, each word that wasn’t a preposition or “please” acted as a prompt. Each prompt is compared against the dataset accessed by the AI program, which is broken down into “tokens” to make them easier to choose and compare which has the highest probability of answering the prompt, “top-k sampling” being one such method. Each interrogation of the dataset presumably also helps tune the models used to access that data.

My paragraph fulfilled the “informative” prompt, but crucially not the “100-word” requirement – I was most surprised that Copilot missed that part of the brief, because the prompt I expected it to have the biggest problem with was “funny”. In trying to make me laugh, Copilot dumped a couple of terms in the middle of its passage that it did not go on to explain, but fortunately it listed the websites from which it gleaned information, including from Wikipedia, Squarespace and IBM.

What I am most unimpressed about is the AI program’s interpretation of “Jack Kerouac”. Kerouac was a Beat Generation novelist, coining the term “beat”, as in tired and “beaten down”. What he didn’t do was call himself a “beatnik” – this is how the sub-culture was fed into the mainstream, codifying poets with a uniform of beret, sandals, striped shirts and bongos, speaking like jazz musicians and reciting poetry in a bad Allen Ginsberg impression.

Just as AI models are essentially answering queries putting one word after the other in the hopes that it makes a coherent sentence, I thought there would be a parallel with the  “spontaneous prose” of Kerouac, who typed manuscripts of novels like “On the Road” and “The Subterraneans” on extended scrolls of tracing paper. “Blow as deep as you want to blow” was the seventh tenet of Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”, but in essentially being a “dumb” program, the AI model concentrated on number thirteen, “remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition”, instead of being able to provide me with moments of insight, those “visionary tics shivering in the chest” (number eleven) – I still had to get that myself.

Upon originally hearing the term “prompt engineering”, I didn’t like the idea that ordering words was “engineering” in any way – “programming”, or even “prompting”, are better terms. I am also not a word engineer – there will never be a situation where words cannot be used creatively, because the spark to use them has to exist. I like to think I care about what I write.

For the record, I did not select that Copilot should use the large language model GPT-4 in creating its answer. I reran the request using this model, thinking it would have picked up some elements of Kerouac’s writing along the way, and while it did a better job of meeting the word count, and didn’t add superfluous emojis, the style was just as egregious – never ask an AI model to emulate a style:

“Alright, dig this, cats and kittens. Prompt engineering is the bee’s knees of AI jazz, where you lay down a line of text that’s cooler than a cucumber in a beatnik’s hand. It’s like whispering sweet nothings into the ear of a machine, hoping it’ll croon back a symphony of sense. You gotta be part poet, part coder, and all daddy-o to get it grooving just right. It’s the art of tickling the binary brain until it giggles out genius. So put on your thinking cap and make with the prompts, and watch that AI paint word-pictures smoother than a sax solo on a Saturday night.”

IT'S TOO LATE TO BE LATE AGAIN [13]

Based on two song lyrics used as titles, and a quote about his tempestuous relationship with the saxophone, “David Bowie” is currently the third most searched term on this site. For someone whose work speaks to everyone, even a little of it goes a very long way.

I switched on to Bowie very late – I don’t remember his albums in my parents’ record collection; my choice of listening when growing up in the 1990s was eclectic, but not yet wide enough; and when studying later, I buried myself in books on philosophy, psychology, art and postmodernism, along with William Burroughs and the other Beat Generation writers.

However, when I did come around, mostly through Jonathan Ross rationing himself to one track per week on his old BBC Radio 2 show, I was primed to pick up on what Bowie wrote into his songs. Far from singing about more than just love, I was listening to an artist making sense of his world, his place in it, and ours, with one eye fixed firmly on what was coming over the horizon.

Since Bowie’s passing in January, my personal tribute became buying his albums – with each one, I have kicked myself that I hadn’t done so before, as “best of” compilations lose the context in which many songs were intended.

Having now heard hundreds of songs, with no day going by without hearing at least one, I fully understand now why the power of Bowie’s art, and the man himself, is adored to the point of worship: in exploring so many styles, so many ideas, and so many identities, especially sexualities and genders, it makes your world bigger, brighter, and so much more open to discovery.

(Plus, having albums you can buy at £6 a pop from HMV is certainly a help – Beatles, take note.)

So, why is 1976’s “Station to Station” my current favourite David Bowie album? The one recorded at reportedly the lowest point in Bowie’s life, and didn’t remember much about recording? The album of the “Thin White Duke,” a character that was “ice masquerading as fire,” singing songs of love while unable to feel it himself? The album of six perfectly crafted tracks, where the title track starts as a black, foreboding drone, placing the singer in a position of power, before exploding into a joyous, driving rock song about someone deluding themselves about what love is?

What’s not to love about that?

Getting to hear “Golden Years” afterwards makes you feel even better, before you realise the Thin White Duke implores his subject to “run for the shadows” for his own benefit. “Word on a Wing” features a fragment of a dream taking over the Duke’s “scheme of things,” before being able to shape them again. “TVC15” features a girlfriend crawling into a television, now misinterpreted in a world of relationships that only take place online.

Before the album closes with a cover of Johnny Mathis’ “Wild Is the Wind,” the chorus of the penultimate track does “Stay” with you: “Stay – that’s what I meant to say or do something… you can never really tell / when somebody wants something you want too.” The Thin White Duke is supposed to be deluding himself, but here, he sounds like all of us, at one time or another, whether we wish to recognise it or not.

I cannot say any more than just tell people to get a copy of “Station to Station.” After that, keep exploring David Bowie’s albums – there is no bigger favour you can give yourself.

YOU BETTER PLAY THAT SAX [6]

I see myself taking up the saxophone at some point. It’s a weird thing for most people to say, but to me, it’s almost inevitable. In fact, this is a warning to my family.

If you liked “The Goon Show,” “The Simpsons,” and David Bowie’s music since childhood, it will have been instilled into you that saxophones are expressive, outrageous, and cool. This is before you even get to jazz, where the objective appears, sometimes, to blow your aching soul through a brass tube.

When Adolphe Sax patented his woodwind instrument a hundred and sixty years ago last Tuesday, they were intended for use in marching bands and orchestras. Sax would later suffer from lip cancer for a five-year period, years before his invention would use the blues to capture that pain.

People have always found ways of getting that bit more out of the saxophone, which changed to suit, its keys moving from the initial oboe-inspired layout to make playing both easier and faster. Its position between conventional brass and woodwind instruments also meant new orchestral pieces could be written using saxophones to blend these sounds together.

As jazz and pop music developed to incorporate its particular sound, the sax was seemingly the “next” instrument to include – once you have your guitars, keyboard and drums, the sax is the next easiest instrument to learn, before you get into the vagaries of finger positioning on the violin, and sorting out your embouchure on a trumpet.

However, you cannot deny that anyone playing a saxophone does look good. You are not stood or sat “behind” the instrument, you can bring it into your body, or hold it out, and its sound is not usually put in the “background” of anything – if you are playing, you are out in front, as people want to hear it.

I know I would have years of practice ahead of me to make all of this sound true, but expressing yourself means you have to start expressing yourself. I shouldn’t mind, however, if all I get to begin are squeaks and squawks, as some people did pretty well out of that.

In a 1983 interview, David Bowie talked about becoming a working musician by playing the saxophone, seeing this as his way out of London, and into America, particularly the 1960s West Coast, Beat Generation counterculture with which he associated the instrument’s sound. However:

“…When I started working with it… I found I didn’t have a very good relationship with the sax and that lasted right the way through. We’re sort of pretty embittered with each other. It lies there waiting for me to touch it. It defies me to... I really have to go through traumas to get anything out of it that anything to do with what I want it to say. So it’s not a steady relationship; it’s not a good one. It really is a love / hate relationship.”

Either Bowie or his sax needed to back off.