#oneaday Day 275: A New Timewaster

I was made aware of a wonderful new timewaster today — Talk to Transformer, which is a website that allows you to type in a "prompt" and then get it completed by an artificial intelligence routine. As a demonstration, the next few paragraphs of this post will be composed by it.

I would have to say that I feel particularly good about this timewaster. If it is even possible to be so pleased about something, that makes the whole effort worth.

A couple of years ago (the timewaster is a bit more new than that) I was on an airplane, listening to Radiohead's first album, "OK Computer." I've enjoyed that album immensely – I remember I was listening, and at one point, Thom Yorke said, "I don't want to sing, I want to just write music and just listen." And he kept singing for two hours; the flight from New York to Seattle was long, and we were waiting to cross the Atlantic.

Then again, his best lyrics are often the hardest ones to compose. In that moment, I listened, for several hours, to music written by Kanye West and had my life transformed. I felt my mind and life were being enriched. My music, in turn, changed my life. And my life, in turn, changed the world.

By writing poetry, we invite your imagination. It might, at times, be frightening. It might be liberating. Or, as I say, it might not even be possible. But that's the beauty of it. The best poetry is as a conduit. It allows your intellect to go through the ideas you want to explore on the page. We're all capable of doing this; it just takes a little more time. It's an act of imagination that takes so much mental power, but in fact can have many positive effects on our lives. After all, our experience of the world consists of our experience of what's written on a page.

It's no secret that I am a huge fan of poetry. I started writing poetry in second grade, with the hope of writing my own work of poetry.

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Gloriously bizarre, isn't it? It sort of makes sense if you just casually read it, but is obviously complete and utter nonsense if you try and figure out what it's trying to say. It's interesting that it seems to draw from a wide variety of sources, though; refresh the same "prompt" several times and you can get very different results inspired by everything from business emails to explicit erotic fiction.

It kind of reminds me of a writing exercise I've done on a number of occasions in the past. I was first introduced to it as part of my degree-level English studies in the Creative Writing module. It's called "Freewriting".

The essence of Freewriting is that you just sit down with a bit of paper (or a blank document — though I always felt it worked better if you were actually hand-writing it), set a stopwatch or countdown timer for ten minutes, and then just write, non-stop, without looking and what is spewing forth from your mind into your pen, until that time expires.

The results can be very interesting, as they vary very much according to your mental state at the time. Sometimes pure creativity will flow out; sometimes incoherent nonsense; sometimes observations of the environment around you. It can be a good means of getting stuff off your chest, and because you're doing it just for yourself, you have no obligation for it to be "good" or even "readable" — but sometimes it can form the basis of something you can flesh out a little bit more.

Creativity is interesting, and seeing a machine try to understand this mysterious process is pretty fascinating! Why not confuse your friends and family by composing all your emails via Talk to Transformer today?