Member-only story
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’
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 speech and asked it to rewrite the paragraphs as a shanty.
Here is GPT-3’s sea shanty version of Obama’s speech:
Oh, we’re off to inaugurate a President,
An inauguration that’s quite historic!
That we have come this far,
There’s not a soul alive today,
That can recall when we were not free!
Oh, we are free!Chorus:
“Hail to the Chief,”
We shall not be moved,
We’ll stay and fight,
For it is the most historic of all our Inaugurations!
We’ve come to inaugurate a President,
A President that’s quite historic!
Yes, we’ll sing and cheer,
Our hearts will have no fear,
When we inaugurate this President!
Yes, we’ll sing and cheer,
Our hearts will have no fear,
When we inaugurate this President!
I then gave GPT-3 the prompt “Here is a sea shanty about the inauguration of Joe Biden as President of the United States” as well as a sample of two lines of such a song written by Michele Banks:
