Turing Test sonnets
Human or Machine: Can You Tell Who Wrote These Poems?
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480639265/human-or-machine-can-you-tell-who-wrote-these-poems
One of them is a dead giveaway of the "well, someone fed the works of Shakespeare into a computer" sort, if you have read enough Shakespeare sonnets to recognize the sorts of vocabulary that you'll find there. (I clicked through to read about the programmers, and sure enough: Shakespeare is a major part of their corpus.)
The other thing that struck me about this is how much the computer-generated sonnets remind me of what people think poetry ought to sound like - mostly, a bunch of disparate (though possibly arresting) images that never build to a point. It's certainly possible to read a poem - a human-written one, I mean - and not understand every line, but there is some kind of organizing principle that will keep you on track (especially in a form as strict and structured as a sonnet). But I think a lot of people think of poetry as sort of floaty nonsense - in which case it becomes a lot harder to say for certain whether a poem was actually written by a person with something to say, or generated by a computer programmed to optimize rhyme patterns. (Do the computer scientists ever employ poets? Or literary critics? Or linguists? Someone who would notice the lack of meaningful grammar and syntax?)
…Now I kind of want to reverse-engineer a lesson plan in which I make my ninth-graders explain to me why the computer-generated poems here are actually not poems.
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480639265/human-or-machine-can-you-tell-who-wrote-these-poems
One of them is a dead giveaway of the "well, someone fed the works of Shakespeare into a computer" sort, if you have read enough Shakespeare sonnets to recognize the sorts of vocabulary that you'll find there. (I clicked through to read about the programmers, and sure enough: Shakespeare is a major part of their corpus.)
The other thing that struck me about this is how much the computer-generated sonnets remind me of what people think poetry ought to sound like - mostly, a bunch of disparate (though possibly arresting) images that never build to a point. It's certainly possible to read a poem - a human-written one, I mean - and not understand every line, but there is some kind of organizing principle that will keep you on track (especially in a form as strict and structured as a sonnet). But I think a lot of people think of poetry as sort of floaty nonsense - in which case it becomes a lot harder to say for certain whether a poem was actually written by a person with something to say, or generated by a computer programmed to optimize rhyme patterns. (Do the computer scientists ever employ poets? Or literary critics? Or linguists? Someone who would notice the lack of meaningful grammar and syntax?)
…Now I kind of want to reverse-engineer a lesson plan in which I make my ninth-graders explain to me why the computer-generated poems here are actually not poems.