The queen is dead

AI: ‘It is with the deepest sorrow that we announce the passing of Her Majesty, the Queen.’

AI Prompted to Sound Like Shakespeare: In profoundest grief, we doth herald the demise of Her Majesty, the Queen.

Shakespeare: The Queen, my lord, is dead.

Literary scholars have pointed out that for the famous line in Macbeth Act 5, Scene 4, Shakespeare had at least two if not three other options for announcing the Queen’s death.

The Queen is dead, my lord.
My lord, the Queen is dead.
And perhaps if Yoda was a character in Macbeth, dead the Queen is, my lord.

As you examine the alternatives, note that nothing is grammatically wrong with any of them. The sentences are perfectly and practically acceptable. But the permutations of the same words convey different emotions.

Shakespeare’s composition puts the word with the most weight at the end. The Queen, my lord, is dead. She is dead. Is there anything more terminal?

Generative artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has no concept of the human and emotional weight of words. Every word is a statistical calculation made by the machine like every other word.

‘It is with the deepest sorrow that we announce the passing of Her Majesty, the Queen,’ outputs GPT4 when prompted to ‘write of the Queen’s death.’

Unlike Shakespeare, GPT4 selects the word order that starts with death and ends with the Queen. The permutation is polite, perhaps familiar, but not as emphatic as Shakespeare’s.

Then the AI continues with platitudes: ‘Through times of change and challenge, she remained a steadfast beacon of strength, guiding the nation with wisdom and grace’ and ‘her contributions to our community have left an indelible mark that will continue to inspire future generations.’

When reading these sentences, perhaps you can feel that something is missing. Unlike Shakespeare, no words ever pack a punch.

AI writing on the death of the queen scanned in GPTZero

These sentences were all detected as AI-generated by GPTZero, demonstrating its ability to identify text that can be written in a more meaningful way.

Writing Advice: Unlike AI, consider an emphatic word ordering. Put some weight on your last words.

# human writing advice #betterthanai

Sources:

Macbeth Original Text: Act 5, Scene 5. No Sweat Shakespeare, September 7, 2015. https://nosweatshakespeare.com/macbeth-play/text-act-5-scene-4/.

Clark, Roy Peter. The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.