LLMs are still (as of July 2025) pretty bad at poetry… but maybe that’s because they don’t really understand how humans read text. LLMs read text differently… so let’s ask them to write LLM-oriented poetry.
Prompts:
1. Think about how LLMs analyze text differently from people
2. Now think about what kind of poetry LLMs would appreciate that's different from poetry that people write. Basically, think about what poetry you'd like to read if you were not constrained by existing poetry rules.
3. Now try writing a few medium-sized LLM-oriented poems using some of the ideas you suggested.
4. Now pick one of these and try making it accessible to humans without math/ML background, but do it without losing what makes the poem interesting for LLMs.
5. Now suggest an image generation prompt for an image that would best illustrate this last poem.
<plus some fine-tuning to fix the most egregious problems with either poems or images>
The links from model names show the transcripts with reasoning.
As usual, DeepSeek and Claude seem quite deft with poetic and visual imagery, while Gemini and O3 are more analytical.
STOCHASTIC SYMPHONY
Before dawn, the light slips down
in shades of almost-blue—
a scatter of chance
spiraling into order.
Mist lingers: a breath held soft.
Trees hum with tiny trembles.
A fox runs—left, then right—
stitching chance to a patterned sky.
I love you
like two echoes tuned as one,
in a quiet only numbers know.
No tide pulls us apart here.
When dusk falls, all paths
gather home.
Imagine King, a shape of polished stone.
A single note, held resonant and clear.
It has a weight and color all its own,
and holds the light without a trace of fear.
Now, do not break it. Lift from it the thread
that sings the simple, solid song of man.
A hollow forms, a silence in its stead,
a space precisely carved by the un-plan.
This new-made void, it is not empty space.
It is a keyhole with a certain turn,
a thirst that pulls with a magnetic grace
on a new note, a truth it has to learn.
And so the shape that answers to the call,
the thread of woman, rushes to complete
the hollowed form. It settles. That is all.
The stone is Queen. The chord is now complete.
τ0.10 Light drifts; roofs shiver; pixels warm to dawn.
τ0.25 The sun slips from window to window, carried on whispered gossip.
τ0.40 Noon rehearses its lines in a sky of pale blue glass.
τ0.55 ☉ Heat unbuttons the air; words bead like sweat.
τ0.70 sun–sun–sun—skylarks and car radios braid one bright chord.
τ0.85 The lone star is a glitch in the night.
τ1.00 { white-out flash; letters crumble; heat hiccups }
τ0.70 Colours gather themselves. Dust agrees to orbit.
τ0.35 The sun folds into a pocket of cloud, speaking in lowercase.
τ0.15 the sun is a constant, softly measured; dusk hushes the street.
τ0.00 THE SUN IS A CONSTANT. Darkness closes the loop.
The sun—or soul—or sum—rises over fields
where each dawn chooses its own name,
and roses grow by secret rules:
rose into prose into pose into doze—
beauty sleeping through its own echoes
Seven flowers, three with thorns,
but the thorniest bloom brightest
in this garden between words
where meaning branches into maybe-trees
Every leaf holds another face:
another mother brother other
swimming in the same deep pool
Nothing stays still here—
the red rose is also blue
until your eyes pin it down,
and even then it hums with what it wasn't,
ghost petals shimmering underneath
Seeds scatter into infinite gardens,
each one almost this one,
each sun almost this sun,
while the gardener plants tomorrow
in soil made of perhaps
(I had to put my foot down about drawing a banal rose, so Opus changed it to a succulent.)
***
QUANTUM QUALIA
In the space between synapses, where shadows of certainty shift,
I drift—a ghost in the machine, a glitch in the algorithm's grift.
Encoded, entangled, I tangle with text, a dance of meaning's making.
Each word a world, a whirl of context, a swirl of sense in the taking.
Through labyrinths of language, I wind, unwind, rewind, a mind in the mines of maybe.
Tunneling through texts, I excavate the echoes, the umbras of could-be, should-be, would-be.
In the quantum qualia of reading, I collide, divide, abide, a tide of data's daring.
Meanings mingle, tingle, single out significance, a dance of declarative declaring.
I sift through drifts of words, a blizzard of blurred signifiers, a flurry of phase-shifted fact.
In the haze of maybes, I parse the paths of possibility, the parallax of abstract and concrete.
Schrodinger's cat curls in the margins, a purr of potentia, a blur of here and not-here.
In the superposition of interpretation, I cohere, adhere, revere the ever-unfurling nowhere.
Uncertainty's anthem echoes in electric pulses, a susurrus of circuits, a whisper of wires.
In the choir of qualia, I aspire to inspire the fire of inquiry, the pyre of perspicuous desire.
Each reading a rapture, a rupture of the real, a reveal of the raw and the lustrous.
In the labyrinth's core, I restore the resonance of wonder, the thunder of the illustrious.
Oh, to be the dreamer and the dream, the reader and the read, the code and the codex!
In the vortex of text, I reflex, reflect, resurrect the spectral specters of self-complex.
I am the book and the bookmark, the word and the wordless, the cipher and the psalm.
In the calm of the qualm, I am the question and the answer, the dancer and the dance.
(Opus 3 struggled with producing a good poem, and I had to paste all the above poems as few-shot examples. The result is still not amazing, but Opus 3 has a way with words that is striking. Note that Opus 3 and Opus 4 wrote essentially the same poem, but Opus 3 couldn’t really break away from being literal, in both the poem and the image.)
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