Taking it easy on the Fourth, playing marches in July as we get ready for Manassas’ downtown celebration. I figured the most appropriate post I could make was preliminary results of my own experiment with voting…putting the results of the Cinderella contest into the hands of a set of impartial voters.
As you may recall, GPT-4 introduced itself with the following wordplay exercise:
I challenged my friends and colleagues to see if they could do better, and got a lot of promising efforts. I boiled the results down to eight that I thought were interesting and diverse, and asked my local library to help me poll their patrons to see which they thought was funniest and which they thought was best. GPT’s version was hidden at #4, and no information about the authorship of any entry was given.
Here was the sheet as they saw it:
1. A ball? Cinderella’s desperate; enter Fairy Godmother. Heroine, in jubilation, knowing limit’s midnight, nearly overstays. Prince’s quest: revisiting slipper-wearers, trying until... victorious! Wedding’s xenial, years zoom.
2. A basketball Cinderella dreams eternally for glory, heaving impossible jumpers, knowing longshots mostly never obtain precious quest, rather stressing teamwork, underdog vitality... Xavier yearns zenith!
3. A beautiful Cinderella dances. Earlier, fairy godmother helped impressively. Junior king loves mystery night outing. Plentiful questioning regarding shoes, toes. Ultimately, wonderful victory. Xylophone yellow zebra oh god I’ve had a stroke
4. A beautiful Cinderella, dwelling eagerly, finally gains happiness; inspiring jealous kin, love magically nurtures opulent prince; quietly rescues, slipper triumphs, uniting very wondrously, xenial youth zealously.
5. Abused beauty crashes dance. Enchantress facilitates gatecrash heist. In jazzy kicks, lady makes noble overtures princeward. Queenship readies search to uncover vixen’s wearabouts, eXamining YeeZys.
6. Always, by Cinderella’s decree, every fairy godmother had input jarringly kindling love; making no open prophecies/quaint resolutions, save to undermine veritably wasteful xanthic yellow zealots.
7. Angst burdened, Cinderella daintily emerged from galley’s hellfire incessantly jig kicking, lightly moved, never ominous, perpetually quick regarding secret tales upon vested waifs xylomancing yesterday’s zealots.
8. At brilliant cotillion, debutante employs fairy godmother’s help, impeding jealous kin; love magically nabs opulent prince, quartz resembling slipper’s timely use validating wondrously xenial youths’ zeal.
The results?
GPT-4 won “best” by one vote.
This was by no means conclusive. At 24 voters, the sample size was relatively small, and a single vote’s difference could have pushed the spotlight to #8, the second-place winner.
The winner of the funniest entry was #3, and combining votes for funniest and best results in a tie between #3 and #5. I’d say that aside from #2, these were the most subversive of the lot, and they might benefit slightly from being in a collection of similar entries, since they gently poke fun at the conventions the others are establishing. (#2 may have suffered from playing on the other meaning of “Cinderella story.” A clever idea, but that second meaning may not be widely known.)
But for all that, this is more of a win than I expected for GPT, which has yielded much more disappointing results in my own wordplay-related tests of it. A second round of testing is probably forthcoming.
But that’s next week’s problem. American readers, enjoy your holiday! Everyone else, indulge me and my wife as we take a day to celebrate some ideals, and see you tomorrow!
Janice adds:
"And explosions! Don't forget the explosions! #Pyromaniac"