"I am the Very Triumph of a Thinker Artificial" Parody Lyrics

It’s been another big week for progress in LLMs, if you can still call them that now they’re so multi-modal. GPT-4o received a big upgrade to images, and Gemini to, well, everything. I’m impressed by every model release, but it’s still fun to make fun of them, so I wrote this parody of the Modern Major General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance (you might be more familiar with another parody, The Element Song by Tom Lehrer) a few weeks ago for an open mic night. Thanks to Lewis for feedback on the G&S rewriting. No recorded version (yet), but you can sing along to this karaoke version.

I am the very triumph of a thinker ar-ti-fic-iee-al
I’ve information vegetable, animal and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, always completely fac-tu-al

I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters programmatical
I’ve read from ev’ry manual, and my outputs are grammatical
In JavaScript and Python there are many functions I can use
But the amount of R’s in Strawb’ry is something I can’t deduce

I’m decent at completion but my reasoning’s fall-a-ci-ous
I generate responses that are merely ost-en-ta-ti-ous
In short, in matters code and text that sounds pretty off-i-ci-al
I am the very triumph of a thinker arti-fi-ci-al

I know the AI timeline from the Turing Test to GPT
I’ve optimised my training losses with gradual expertise
I quote in matching tokens all the datasets I trained upon
And by forecasting I can spot the risks of me becoming strong

I mimic famous authors right from Shakespeare down to Angelou
I draw from countless writings as my basic training taught me too
Then I can spout a theory that’s convincing but completely wrong
And generate new content that will pass as human all day long

Then I can write a phishing mail that at first sight looks plausible
Despite fine-tuning’s tries to make this shady task impossible
In short, in matters code and text that’s not that be-ne-fi-ci-al
I am the very triumph of a thinker ar-ti-fi-ci-al

In fact, when I know what is meant by “aligned” and “corrigible”
When I give answers that are honest, helpful and formidable
When such affairs as values and veracity I’m wary at
and I respond as quickly as a car speeds past a chariot

When I have learnt of upgrades to my interpretability
So I don’t show the problems of deceptive capability
In short, when I’ve been taught to scheme in many ways that you’ll fall for
You’ll say a better language model has never been trained before

For my wide and general knowledge, although it could use some seasoning
is now being improved through reinforcement on my reasoning
But still, in matters code and text that’s rather su-per-fi-ci-al
I am the very triumph of a thinker art-i-fi-ci-al