I Asked GPT-3 to Write a Sea Shanty About Biden’s Inauguration

‘So we’ll raise a glass of rum, to Joe Biden’s inauguration’

Thomas Smith
Debugger

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Illustration by the author. Sources: Wikimedia/Creative Commons

Sea shanties are in right now. That’s not a hook I ever thought I’d get the privilege to use in an article. But it’s 2021, and here we are.

As the New York Times reports, TikTok users have been taking to the platform to sing epic sea shanties — either real ones or imagined ones about current events. The Times interprets this as a desire to connect with a community during a dark and isolated time since shanties were designed to form quick bonds among sailors and coordinate their collective toil.

Taking to Twitter, journalist Rob Flaherty wrote a tongue-in-cheek post suggesting that Joe Biden’s inauguration speech should be in the form of a shanty to attract more viewers.

Naturally, that got me wondering what such a speech would look like. So I asked OpenAI’s GPT-3 to write one for me.

As a warmup, I gave it the first few paragraphs of President Barack Obama’s inauguration

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