There was a time some years ago when BTR had a sideline in poetic assemblage, known as Squotations: strict 5-7-5 haikus “constructed entirely from the selected Internet quote site content of the quotee.” Five such Squotations were constructed from the quoted material of Duchamp:

1.
The consummated 
chess brain is deciphering 
thoughts of coition 

2.
Art that is eating 
the spectator interests 
me more than beauty 

All of these were run through Chat for images, but only this one is worth noting. After going on about its sex and violence restrictions like it was Demerzel reciting Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, Chat spat this obscenity.

Moving along, thank you.

3.
The glass pane of art 
is interpreting the world 
through a shop window 

Actually, Chat had a pretty good image for this too, and it chose to include the text, but it did so with unusual deftness.

4.
Commercialized man 
cannot express taste, merely 
external regret 

5.
Conforming is a 
creative act . . . Objects are 
ruled by possession 

What if we run them through the same language filters that were used for the initial BTR-Image experiment? That would be French, Finnish, Frisian, Friulian, Greek, and Icelandic. It turns out that Frisian and Friulian are Indo-European languages (West Germanic and Romance, respectively)—when they were randomly chosen, they were complete mysteries. Icelandic may seem to be a Bjorkian outlier here, though it too is part of the Indo-European family, as is Greek. Finnish is a Uralic language, though what any of this means to the process remains unclear, which is as it should be. The Absolute cannot be quantified. At any rate, they’ve been manually lineated in a nod to the haiku, but of course they’re not strict haikus. Let’s call them unrhymed tercets. 

1.
The skop (or paradox) 
directs the thinking that it 
must be created with the spirit 

OK, the first one out of the blocks is so philosophically weighty it may require heavy equipment to position it. It’s no longer about chess or coition, of course, or at least not directly, though I’m sure it can be argued that everything is about chess and coition. It’s more likely about Cartesian dualism, and the key is skop. This is probably an Icelandic artifact of the filtering, but Bing Translate has passed it back to English untouched, at the same time calling it a paradox. How do we interpret this? Well, it depends on how we choose to interpret the mystery word, which has various meanings in various languages. We’re going with the Indonesian, where it means scope, as in the “breadth, depth or reach of a subject: domain.” The Icelandic meaning is “humor, jest, mockery, ridicule,” which also has some resonance, but it can’t match scope. But still, what do we make of it? Is Duchamp, the ghost in the machine, telling us something along the lines of, “The paradoxical world suggests God,” or is he telling us the opposite, or is he just rudely and nudely descending a prayer space? It’s ambiguously Duchampian, and that’s just dandy. But why leave well enough alone? Let’s see what some instant image generators will do with it. As usual, the poem is the prompt. First thought, best thought, though in this case, not so much. In fact, not at all.

Chat and Gemini went for the easy infinity shortcut. Chat at least kept it simple and dignified. Grok did stock photos not worthy of notice, hence not noticing. Midjourney did bad sci-fi paperback covers, but this one is at least hard to parse. Meta, which spits four at a time, cranked out “spiritual” stock illustrations but threw in this weirdly disturbing C.S. Lewis nightmare. All told, it’s a big skopout.

2.
The list that the viewer 
asked me for is more 
interested in me than beauty. 

Um, no, just doesn’t work. What list did the viewer ask for? Sounds like a catalogue raisonné. Not going down this rabbit hole.

3.
The bowl 
interprets the mountain 
through the bowl. 

Yes! This could be Bashō or Kerouac. It could be a take on the super swordsman Musashi quote about, “Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.” It could be Jungian, though anything could be Jungian. It’s just perfect as it is. Needs no further interrogation. Will images somehow enhance its meaning with sudden stabs of the immediately marvelous? Hell, no. Grok and Meta are ploddingly literal, so forget them. Midjourney (left) manages one of its four to be at least aesthetically pleasing and in the conceptual ballpark, and Gemini achieves this with a single image, as does Chat, but Chat adds hands holding the bowl, which is a grotesque intrusion, so not showing.

4.
A competitor cannot express
their taste, but only speaks
from the outside.  

Way too clunky and prosaic, forget it.

5.
Tapping is a creative space . . .
These items will be adjusted
according to the property. 

“Tapping” suggests the early Surrealist obsession with séances, but otherwise this is a dud. However, Midjourney, when cranking its quartet on the original prompt of #5, about the creativity of conforming, produced this wonder:

A view inside the mind of Hans Bellmer? Nah, not nearly obscene enough. I ask Copilot, just because it’s sitting there on Bing, what it makes of “a head full of spheres.” It starts to go on about Surrealism and Lovecraft, among other artsy things, but it’s just pulling my chain, knowing what I’ve searched for in the past. Then, to my surprise, just like Chat, it asks if I might like it to “spin a short surreal poem” on the concept. Did the also-ran of the major chatbots get an upgrade? Sure, Copilot. Strut your stuff! The poem is so bad, I’m running it in full.

In the orchard of the skull, round thoughts bloom—
violet moons, whispering in silent symmetry.

One orb hums like antique glass beneath the sun.
Another ticks with the clockwork pulse of vanished cities.

A sphere of dust dreams of rain,
while the chrome one reflects the face of things not yet born.

They roll, collide, recombine—
planets in exile,
synapses adrift in a ballroom of fog.

No lips to speak, no eyes to weep,
just orbit upon orbit—
ideas dancing in gravitational solitude.

And I’m not running it through BTR, though it sure is tempting . . .