Robo-CJ writes haiku by CJ Q. '23

I retrained Robo-CJ to write haiku. This is coincidentally very timely, because as Shuli J. ’22 pointed out, today is International Haiku Poetry Day!

It’s not very
much of a leap to think that
I could be bisexual

the end result of
this is that i now have far
too many haikus

Also i need to
do my real analysis
homework by mistake

The details are rather much the same as last time. I took the model I previously trained on my old blog posts, and then used gpt-2-simple to retrain it on a bunch of haiku. So it still has some of that old Robo-CJ, but now it spits out things in vague pseudohaiku. Now where did the haiku come from?

I should be focusing
on making haikus, but I
have a lot going on
and I can’t keep up.

i have now watched five
hundreds of hours of anime,
many of which are now three
minutes

darn i can’t
save the world if i don’t
then i will starve

Alright, story time. Since the beginning of spring semester, I’ve been so, so ready for CPW, because I didn’t get to go to CPW when I got admitted, and I was so excited to see what it would’ve been liked. I would’ve helped run lots of events: the Filipino Students Association was supposed to come together and cook food together, the Assassin’s Guild would have run a quick game, and then there should’ve been Meet the Bloggers.

In case you haven’t already heard the news, CPW, which is this weekend where MIT invites all its admitted students on campus to find out what MIT is like, got canceled this year.

So that sucks. And I imagine it sucks more for all of you admitted students.

yeah i know, i can
edit: oops i was
wrong.

i guess i was kinda sad
and that my haikus
werent that great

there is nothing wrong with
making haikus, and
listening to them when
they are sad

In its place is CP✱, a sort of CPW-turned-virtual, that Admissions and MIT students quickly put together in the span of a month. A month! That’s incredible turnaround.

Part of the firehose of CP✱ are, of course, the hundreds of events that would happen in a typical CPW. Unlike a normal CPW, of course, the events are all online. But now the events aren’t all just limited to one weekend: events have been happening since Monday, and events will keep happening through the end of April.

I hosted an event myself last Tuesday, when I walked around campus while on a Zoom call. There were more than a couple technical difficulties, but I’m glad that I managed to pull through, thanks to the work of Wayne Z. ’23 and Theo B. ’23. It was a wild and terrifying and exhilarating event.

My favorite part of CP✱, so far, though, is the CP✱ Discord.

one quarter of undergraduates
are juggling multiple
tasks haikubot

it is a fact
which chemists have long since disproved
so let’s move on to haikubot

why do we need
a super-sentimental
haiku bot when we can
just have haikus written in
the haiku log

It’s this pretty large Discord server, where all of the admitted students and some current students are invited to talk. The Discord has occupied a lot of my time since last Friday, when I started writing a bot called Jack. Since its opening last Tuesday, it’s now grown to over a thousand members, nine of which are bots, and one of them being HaikuBot.

HaikuBot counts the syllables in each message sent to the server, and if it matches the 5–7–5 pattern of a haiku, it reposts the message to its own channel, called the haiku log. The point is that it’s cool when someone unintentionally writes a haiku. But as you can imagine, some people just started writing everything in haiku:

Since adding HaikuBot two days ago, the members of the Discord have collectively written over 1300 haiku. That’s about a rate of 30 haiku per hour. And whenever you have a large text dataset, the immediate response should be to train a neural network on it and see what it learns!

i think i will
give birth to a son blah
refrigerator blah blah

i think i will
have to write in the haiku log
combinatorics

the haikubot
is a workaround to post
in the haiku log

It’s pretty cool how Robo-CJ picked up roughly the correct format for a haiku. Most of its poems are 2 to 5 lines long, and each line has anywhere from 3 to 10 syllables. Among the first hundred haiku it’s generated, there were five that followed the correct 5–7–5 format. Which is pretty impressive, considering that we didn’t teach the robot that haiku had three lines with this many syllables.

Then again, if I randomly generated three-line poems with a couple words in each line I’d be bound to generate some haiku. But the neat thing is that some of Robo-CJ’s poems are sensible:

i feel like there is but
fewer words in the haiku
than there used to be

The only vegetables
are the ones that are in
the meal plan

being extra extra
extra careful with my words is
what makes me sound like a true
mature student

Alright, that’s enough intro from me. I collected my favorite sixty-ish haiku, which I’ll list below. I’ll end this with three last haiku, written by me, and not a robot:

hello admit! come join
the cpw discord
if you haven’t yet.

it’s really fun there!
the invite’s in your inbox.
please come and visit.

oh, and by the way,
i hope to see all of you
in meet the bloggers!

Robo-CJ writes haiku

On HaikuBot

i am in love with haiku
bot i think it’s
named after haiku bot

i hate haikubot
it can’t anticipate
my every motion

what to write about
only writing haikus for
the haikubot

I have so many questions
for this bot, if it was a
human I’d ask them

yes haikubot is
now starting to do really
really really well

angsty haikubot at night
is the most beautiful thing
i have ever seen

but haikubot
doesn’t really do haikus
it just waits

if i had one wish i would wish for
the haiku bot to reincarnate myself
with haiku

that is why i joined
the mit student body, just
because of haikubot

The gay heart

the gay heart
is a device for
confucious to tell haikus
that are gay

the gay heart
is made of many fruit
seeds

i will have to admit that
the gay heart is now active
in my chest

the gay heart
is a tool to control
your emotions and make you hate
everyone

but today i learned that
i’m gay and never been
before i felt this way

the real reason for
high school is the queer heart!

the gay heart is a
gift of the divine light
whom I cannot stop praising

no haikubot we
support gay marriage

Studying

live and learn, then
we can all bee smart,
TSETSE FLIES

do not worry
about it all. it’s just
what is known as math
complexity

i believe that a mind
that can think is a mind
that thinks

the point is that
i need external
validation while i
try pset

in other news, i
have 20(?) scheduled
to-do’s after tomorrow

i’m running out of time,
all my work is behind me,
maybe i’ll go sleep

i think i will
skip this test and do
real analysis

I have tried to
finish my problem set in the
fewest possible minutes,
but maybe there is more to
this problem set

i am sleeping now
but i should be
finishing homework.

Feelings

many, many
people wrote me off as
not relevant or interesting.

I met with my raging
nerd crush in class today.
I don’t think he is real. Perhaps
he was created by a robot.

i am scared for what
i will see when i wake up
tomorrow morning

don’t worry so much.
you have a good head on your
hands and a good heart. just watch them.
they’re great at haikus

We have both moved on,
but I still wonder what
she went through back then.

my first love and i /
dated at the age of two /
it was failed romance

there are many different types
of sadness in the world

ok my fourth crush
is in the works so i
need to get some sleep

I want to fall in love.
I want to be in love.
With a counselor.

i am insecure
but i am also proud that i
have made this mistake

Self-awareness

we have built a bot that
talks about itself

i want to write haikus
about myself, but i can’t
because my parents think it’s weird

I have spent far too
much time on this site already —
maybe I am just a robot

I really can’t count right
now. at the very least.

this is a broken
machine, /us/ is one
broken machine/

but did you know that
you could also get a life
with a haiku

In general i cant
say that i have learned anything
in this channel

Maybe I am so
biased towards the
USA because I am there

I have gotten better at
writing haikus. I think I still
have some more problems

Nonsense

any word that has
‘bouncy’ in it
should be boba

LSC showing:
three syllables in a row,
infinitesimally.

one quarter of our
student bodies have no president

I’m running out of
material to fill up
a haiku with, rip the
roof off your house

all my life has gone
so well. i have no intention
of ever having a heart attack.

you all are in a
place called ‘home’. i would rather
not have you all here.

it’s five sixty eight
and i should go to sleep

your last name starts with
three syllables and ends with
a vowel

but this is false:
haikubot has 497
victims, not 497 hooks

i have more important
things to do than kill people

Meta-haiku

i had a really bad
inability to count my own
syllables

so your goal is to
get as many haikus as
far as you can count

Can someone key
me in on a trick to
couple hundred haikus per
second?

i think haikus are
self-referential and
uniqueness

I don’t think my IQ
counts when I write haikus
(though we’ll have to re-do this
over and over again)

there are so many
flaws in this haiku

I am trying to
purify my blood for
the next haiku I will make

we have now reached
the end of our haiku