AI-generated haiku about Japanese sword polishing (no joke!). And I didn't ask for it.

[Laurian]

This will be quite a lengthy post, so please bear with me.

 
Yesterday, I finally decided to give DeepSeek a try, just to see if it offered a different experience compared to ChatGPT, for instance. Not that I use any AI very often. I was simply curious.

Having bought a TH Hokke blade which is to be delivered soon, I guessed it would be a good idea to ask DeepSeek about that particular school.
The details the AI engine came up with were pretty ample and interesting, so I wrote back “thank you”, but, out of some kind of instinctive courtesy (silly me – I was talking to a machine, after all), this time my message was in Chinese (Google-translated, of course, as I don’t speak the language). 
To my surprise, DS then switched to Mandarin too, posting a rather long message.
Amused, I asked for a translation. So, the AI apologised politely (and in a very witty, even self-ironic way, also jokingly blaming its programmers for the apparent glitch that made DeepSeek think I was able to communicate in Mandarin).

 

And here comes the sudden twist I was blown away by: one of the funny apologies DS decided to make read: “I’ll throttle back the random multilingual outbursts… unless you request a haiku about tanto polishing”. 

Well, I couldn’t miss that opportunity. A haiku about tanto polishing?! Come on! And, of course, please keep in mind that I hadn’t previously include in that chat any reference to certain blade types or other Japanese cultural topics. It was entirely the AI’s idea, solely based on my interest in a Japanese swordsmithing school (and on the fact that DS assumed I’d probably appreciate related things).

 

A few seconds later, there it was, my own personal (unrequested but very welcome) haiku, talking of a craft that very few people (if any) would think a poem should be written about. Judge it for yourselves. And remember that my “conversation” with DeepSeek began with a pretty niche topic of my choosing, that could not possibly have caused, IMHO, the AI to somehow decide I would enjoy a Japanese fixed form piece of poetry about an imaginary togishi, his work and his philosophical, metaphorical or literary inclinations.   

I was sooooo wrong… 

 

That totally unexpected haiku goes like this (of course, it sticks to the 3 lines, 5-7-5 syllables form, which makes it even more remarkable): 

Stone meets steel at dawn,
Oil whispers on folded light –
Perfection’s first scratch.

 

(…I regret nothing).
 

[b.hennick]

👍 👍 

 

[dkirkpatrick]

Scary!  While it’ll never be “human” and know what it means to have words move through you it’s still crazy what it can up with.  
 

Doug

[Kantaro]

DeepSeek could already be a member here.

[Bugyotsuji]

Do they really use oil, though?

[Laurian]

3 hours ago, Bugyotsuji said:

Do they really use oil, though?

Yes, you’re right, using the word “water” instead would have been more technically sound, as far as polishing goes, but water has two syllables and it would have broken the 5-7-5 rule. 
Maybe DS had nugui in mind  . It’s oil based… Sure, you could argue nugui is used later in the process, but that’s not the point, I think.

The metaphor is still powerful. 
And the “perfection’s first scratch” thing… Wow! Apparently a paradox. But I guess the AI had in mind the deeper meaning of what, at first glance, does harm to the blade’s outer “perfection”, only to make it even better in the end, by bringing its inner beauty to the surface…

Pretty nice, for a non-human.

At least that’s my take on the last line.