In 2020 I tried to make a poetry generator. I always romanticized the idea of the computer making poetry as the closest thing to real-life mysticism I could get to. The problem when you're trying to make a black box generator as someone nontechnical, is you still need to construct the box itself. The most plug-and-play methods of calling an OpenAI API did not exist, and the closest thing I had to it was using RunwayML to make calls to some models, which did not return the poetic results I wanted. The end result, after fiddling with Markov chains and if-then statements, was just a project that queried poems from an existing database using an image. I couldn't access this mystical source that was a linear regression on all the poetry the universe had to offer, because it did not exist.