🟦 Did my omikuji generator trace the edge of the corpus?

#ai #promptengineering #llm

A quiet look at how structure, not meaning, made the words land.

😓 A meaningless prompt, maybe

A friend of mine read my previous post, “The Omikuji Generator,” and said,
“It was so… interesting.”

Honestly, I just wanted to mess around.
Mondays need that.
I gave the AI a script, asked for a fortune,
and watched it mumble something strange back.

It wasn’t deep.
(The code barely held together.)

But still—
I found myself thinking,
“What was that, exactly?”

🤔 What emerged—and why it shouldn’t

Sometimes I give GPT strange requests—
like “Give me a word from outside the corpus.”

It answers with something unreal—a word it shouldn't know.
And yet, it works.
The meaning feels plausible, the sentence lands.

How is that possible?

🧠 Just a theory

Maybe this was a kind of emergent structure—
a word with no meaning,
still landing in a sentence that made sense.

GPT wasn’t supposed to do that.
Its outputs are based on known data.
But instead, it returned something unfamiliar,
a word outside its training distribution.

The unfamiliar word was handled
through syntax, rhythm, and contextual patterns,
and structurally, the sentence held.

Maybe it came from the way I phrased the prompt
“Find something at the edge.”
Maybe that phrasing guided it just far enough
to maintain structural coherence near the edge of meaning.

🧐 How prompts shape structure

Does GPT really not understand meaning?

I’m not so sure.
Its internal embedding space encodes all kinds of semantic closeness—
not as definitions, but as relationships across contexts.

The model’s space doesn’t literally shift,
but the weights that guide its output do, strongly shaped by prompts.
So maybe I didn’t change the space itself,
but I did change where GPT was looking.

That’s why I don’t think it was a glitch.
It was interpreted accurately, and with surprising consistency.
I still believe the structure of the prompt shaped the path GPT followed.

It wasn’t reaching beyond meaning.
It was operating near the edge of structure.

And from that edge,
it produced something that felt—strangely—real.

😌 Alignment, not understanding

My omikuji generator had no real meaning.
But something still emerged.
Not quite a poem, more like a structure that felt poetic.

The AI wasn’t understanding me.
And I wasn’t decoding the AI.
But between randomness and rhythm,
something aligned.

Maybe that’s enough, sometimes.
Not a shared meaning, just a shape that holds for a moment.

DEV Community