Finally got my AI to write a decent poem after 47 tries

I've been messing around with this local LLM on my old gaming pc for about two weeks now, trying to get it to generate something that didn't sound like a bad greeting card. Last night I decided to feed it a specific prompt with three random words from a book I was reading - 'rust', 'sparrow', and 'apartment'. And it actually spit out a poem that made me stop and read it twice. Not like Shakespeare or anything, but it had this weird vibe about a bird on a fire escape that felt real. The funny thing is I had been trying all these complex prompts with emotion and style instructions, but the simple constraint of those three words is what did it. I learned that sometimes limiting the AI's options makes it work better than piling on instructions. Has anyone else found a weird trick like that with their AI experiments?

2 comments

2 Comments

knight.diana18d ago

Did you try the same three words again or swap them out to see if the trick holds up? I had a similar thing with mine where "broken hinge" and "pigeon" gave me way better results than asking for "sad and lonely." Really curious if the randomness of those specific words is what makes it click or if any three random ones work.

lee_bailey6518d ago

47 tries is dedication right there, I gave up after 12 on my first go. Here is what nobody has talked about yet: the temperature setting on that thing is probably as important as the words themselves. I found that if I bump the temperature up to like 0.9 with a short weird word list, the AI gets wild and creative instead of boring. But if I keep it at the default 0.7 with the same trick, it just plays it safe and sounds like a robot. The three word limit forces the AI to fill in gaps without you telling it how to feel, and the high temperature lets it take those weird leaps. You might want to try the same rust sparrow apartment prompt but crank the temperature up a notch and see if the poem gets even stranger. Just a thought from my own tinkering nights.