GPT-4 Flunks the Palindrome Test

Coping with disappointment.

I was going to do a piece on the art of writing AI prompts with a constrained-writing, wordplay focus. But as I test AI further, I begin to doubt that it’s actually that good with constrained-writing wordplay, despite the abecedarian Cinderella sentence that GPT-4’s creators used to promote it.

Consider the palindrome. It’s very easy for a computer program to tell whether something is a palindrome or not: all they need to do is ignore any non-alphabetical characters and make sure that what’s left has a symmetrical structure, testing the first letter against the last letter, the second against the second-to-last, the third against the third-to-last, and so on. The Anagram Generator is a piece of software that can generate short palindromes from any dictionary that it’s given.

Too bad the much-ballyhooed AIs of today have no interest in doing so. Here’s a few things I tried with GPT-4:

Me: Write an inspirational palindrome sentence.

GPT-4: Able was I ere I saw Elba.

Anybody who knows this quote knows that it’s the opposite of inspirational…it is Napoleon mourning the end of his powers, not celebrating his powers or yours. If I trace GPT-4’s “thought process,” I figure it looked at a list of palindrome sentences, found one with the word “able” in it and said, “Well, ‘able’ appears in a lot of inspirational sentences” and called it a day from there.

I asked for a second go, and this time, it gave me…

Rise to inspire, a radiant fire.

Well, that’s inspirational, all right…got the word “inspire” right in there, and “radiant fire” is actually a lovely image. But it’s not even close to being a palindrome. And really, how inspired can I be by someone who ignores my instructions?

Maybe I just need to get more specific?

Me: Write an inspirational sentence that reads the same forwards and backwards.

GPT-4: “Rise to inspire, inspire to rise.”

This gets partial credit: it’s a word palindrome instead of a letter palindrome, but it gives me some hope that I’m on the right track. More specific yet?

Me: Write an inspirational sentence, the letters of which read the same forwards and backwards.

GPT-4: "Eva, can I see bees in a cave?"

We’re back to real palindromes—but not inspirational ones. Nor are they original, which would be excusable if they were inspiring, but they’re neither. Requests for do-overs yield the familiar “Never odd or even,” then “Able was I ere I saw Elba” again, and then repeats of both those two.

But let’s not give up so easily. One of the tips I see mentioned often in AI-prompt literature is that responses often get more like what you want if you provide some examples first. Also, GPT-4 is capable of reading much longer instructions than people give it.

So in the spirit of not asking others to do things that I wouldn’t ask of myself, I skated around and found or created a few inspirational palindromes. I’m no great palindromist: most of these are copied from elsewhere, and there’s room for criticism about some of them. One (“Rise, sir”) is gender-specific; others are only inspirational in certain contexts. But still, this is a good-faith effort to get GPT-4 to understand better what I need from it:

Me: Write inspirational palindromes, in which the letters read the same forward and backward, that contains straightforward verbs, positive images, or images of happiness. Here are some examples:

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Live on time…emit no evil.

Race fast, safe car.

Pull up if I pull up.

Rail at a liar!

Pep, pep, pep!

Rise, sir.

Step on no pets.

Pull a bat up. Put a ball up.

Yay!

ChatGPT:

Revive, rise! Ever resilient, deliver.

Shine, oh star! Radiate joy, adore nature.

Embrace life! Experience, cherish each moment.

Laugh, giggle, smile. Radiate bliss, a delight.

Evoke love, revere life. Rediscover, embrace.

Savor love's desserts. Taste life's sweet reward.

Racecar, drive! Excel, oh reviver, car!

Step up, don't pause. Continue, onward we go.

Radiate a love so deep, even in evil do we endure.

Leap, evolve. Revive, believe, live deep.

Level a kayak, kayak a level.

Delight, inspire. Rise up, sir, inspire, delight.

One of these manages to be an actual palindrome, using nothing but palindromic words (“Level a kayak, kayak a level”). The others seem to be inspired by well-known palindromes now and then, using words like racecar, reviver, desserts (which goes with stressed), and their related forms.

But still, there was a basic instruction here, and almost always, GPT-4 failed at creating original palindromes. In the prior exercises, the best it could do was reproduce what it had read elsewhere, and without seeming to understand it to any great degree.

I’ll continue to tinker with what GPT-4 and other services have to offer. But this exercise brings another palindrome to mind: dud.