Tezos

howl III

Creator

tz1TJeLZPhHFPfZqSFcxQrpbjU8C2SjwYnqF

Description

Allen Ginsberg burst onto the literary scene with his hypnotic poem "Howl," delivered at a San Francisco art gallery in October 1955. The harrowing elegy, with its catalogue of ruined visionaries and of Moloch, the god who devoured them, is widely regarded as one of the founding documents of the 1960s counterculture and its critique of postwar America. Since then it has become strangely intermingled with contemporary internet culture. In 2014, Scott Alexander opened his essay "Meditations on Moloch" with an excerpt from the poem, recasting the demon as a name for perverse incentives and coordination failure. The essay circulated widely in the rationalist community, for which the risk of unaligned artificial intelligence had become a central preoccupation. Several of the major AI labs drew founders and funding from that same community, a recurring pattern in which concern about AI risk ends in acceleration. "howl" takes the structure of the original poem, converting each line into a piece of software that outputs endless variations from pools of AI-generated vocabulary. Each iteration spawns a new terminal window, replacing Ginsberg's reading with the tokenised rhythm of a large language model.

Traits

Tag

ginsberg

Tag

generative

Tag

poetry

Tag

Token

Contract: KT1WGE...GG8F
Token ID: 3

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