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There's AARON, which paints interesting pictures.

His latest project, Aaron, is the result of many years of experiment and refinement. The K++ project can draw abstract polygons. Aaron can draw portraits, landscapes, and still lives using perspective, detail, and composition.

Poe's poems, like any good poems, have meat because they were vested with real thought, effort and genius by their author. As such they have intrinsic merit.

You can't really think that anything on that program's page is just as good as

Ah distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each seperate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor

or Frost, for example:

Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice;
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that, for destruction, ice
Is also great,
And would suffice.

Artists have lost the idea nowadays that real art has intrinsic value proportional to the real talent and effort that goes into it. What is this idea that words are just generic symbols, devoid of any of their own meaning? Words have well-defined meanings as well as emotional value, and this is why we use them and what makes them powerful in art.

Here is a link to the site where you can download this program.

Also, check out the book "Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence and the Work of Harold Cohen" and Dr. Dobbs article.

Having said that...

Computers can supposedly create original paintings, so can it be long before they start creating original letters to the editor? ;-)

I kinda noticed that when I was posting but wasn't 100% sure I remembered the syllable counts. Now that you mention it, flipping through his sample poems, there are a bunch of them that are off by a syllable or two in various lines. I thought haiku's were all 5-7-5 in terms of syllables per line. But I have vague recollection that there are more flexible forms; are they still legitimately called haiku? An article found via Google suggests so, but while doing, describes the primacy of the 5-7-5 form. Here's another definition of haiku, pretty interesting.

The syllable patterns in the "haiku" listed in his book (p163-166) and website have the syllabic patterns:
5-5-5, 4-7-6, 5-5-6, 4-5-4, 6-5-5, 4-6-7
Another list of poems from his website includes haiku with syllabes:
5-6-5, 3-4-5, 4-4-4, 3-5-4, 5-8-5, 6-4-7, 4-6-7, 5-6-6

Fourteen haiku, all hand selected from hundreds or thousands of presumably worse ones, and not even one 5-7-5 haiku!

What's even more troubling is the potential manipulation of the input. The poem I quoted was generated "after reading poems by Ray Kurzweil and Wendy Dennis." What isn't disclosed in the book AFAICT, but is mentioned on the Cybernetic Poet website is the background of Wendy Dennis, who is one of the two authors fed in to that poem I first quoted:
Wendy Dennis (KCAT Research Analyst) organized an
effort to gather files of poetry from 16 contemporary
poets. Files of poetry from 20 classical poets were
provided by The Poetry Archives. Wendy was also the
project's Poet Personality Designer, and designed the
100 poet personalities that are included with the
program.

This implies that there could be at least two other potential factors that make the poems "look intelligent" here:
1) the particular pieces of poetry fed in to the program are carefully hand-selected to generate human-looking output
2) the poetry fed into the system could actually be *composed* in an optimal way so to produce interesting-looking output (output that owes more to the data entered than the code written)

Well, thanks for the conversational spur to look into this. It's been educational.


Artificial thought --
They call it intelligence;
I'm still better. Hah!

(Oops, forgot the nature theme to make it truly traditional.)

Winters' discontent --
a stark new competitor
arises. Shot down!

--LP


P.S. The above post was created by a wetware neural network going by the handle LinuxParanoid, an engineer by training with little education in poetry. The subject did learn how to write haiku in middle school but had no further education on the subject and has never pursued haiku as a hobby. Both haiku were written in under 2 minutes each, with the subject having written maybe one haiku in the last ten years on a lark.

I kinda noticed that when I was posting but wasn't 100% sure I remembered the syllable counts. Now that you mention it, flipping through his sample poems, there are a bunch of them that are off by a syllable or two in various lines. I thought haiku's were all 5-7-5 in terms of syllables per line. But I have vague recollection that there are more flexible forms; are they still legitimately called haiku? An article found via Google suggests so, but while doing, describes the primacy of the 5-7-5 form. Here's another definition of haiku, pretty interesting.

The syllable patterns in the "haiku" listed in his book (p163-166) and website have the syllabic patterns:
5-5-5, 4-7-6, 5-5-6, 4-5-4, 6-5-5, 4-6-7
Another list of poems from his website includes haiku with syllabes:
5-6-5, 3-4-5, 4-4-4, 3-5-4, 5-8-5, 6-4-7, 4-6-7, 5-6-6

Fourteen haiku, all hand selected from hundreds or thousands of presumably worse ones, and not even one 5-7-5 haiku!

What's even more troubling is the potential manipulation of the input. The poem I quoted was generated "after reading poems by Ray Kurzweil and Wendy Dennis." What isn't disclosed in the book AFAICT, but is mentioned on the Cybernetic Poet website is the background of Wendy Dennis, who is one of the two authors fed in to that poem I first quoted:
Wendy Dennis (KCAT Research Analyst) organized an
effort to gather files of poetry from 16 contemporary
poets. Files of poetry from 20 classical poets were
provided by The Poetry Archives. Wendy was also the
project's Poet Personality Designer, and designed the
100 poet personalities that are included with the
program.

This implies that there could be at least two other potential factors that make the poems "look intelligent" here:
1) the particular pieces of poetry fed in to the program are carefully hand-selected to generate human-looking output
2) the poetry fed into the system could actually be *composed* in an optimal way so to produce interesting-looking output (output that owes more to the data entered than the code written)

Well, thanks for the conversational spur to look into this. It's been educational.


Artificial thought --
They call it intelligence;
I'm still better. Hah!

(Oops, forgot the nature theme to make it truly traditional.)

Winters' discontent --
a stark new competitor
arises. Shot down!

--LP


P.S. The above post was created by a wetware neural network going by the handle LinuxParanoid, an engineer by training with little education in poetry. The subject did learn how to write haiku in middle school but had no further education on the subject and has never pursued haiku as a hobby. Both haiku were written in under 2 minutes each, with the subject having written maybe one haiku in the last ten years on a lark.

I kinda noticed that when I was posting but wasn't 100% sure I remembered the syllable counts. Now that you mention it, flipping through his sample poems, there are a bunch of them that are off by a syllable or two in various lines. I thought haiku's were all 5-7-5 in terms of syllables per line. But I have vague recollection that there are more flexible forms; are they still legitimately called haiku? An article found via Google suggests so, but while doing, describes the primacy of the 5-7-5 form. Here's another definition of haiku, pretty interesting.

The syllable patterns in the "haiku" listed in his book (p163-166) and website have the syllabic patterns:
5-5-5, 4-7-6, 5-5-6, 4-5-4, 6-5-5, 4-6-7
Another list of poems from his website includes haiku with syllabes:
5-6-5, 3-4-5, 4-4-4, 3-5-4, 5-8-5, 6-4-7, 4-6-7, 5-6-6

Fourteen haiku, all hand selected from hundreds or thousands of presumably worse ones, and not even one 5-7-5 haiku!

What's even more troubling is the potential manipulation of the input. The poem I quoted was generated "after reading poems by Ray Kurzweil and Wendy Dennis." What isn't disclosed in the book AFAICT, but is mentioned on the Cybernetic Poet website is the background of Wendy Dennis, who is one of the two authors fed in to that poem I first quoted:
Wendy Dennis (KCAT Research Analyst) organized an
effort to gather files of poetry from 16 contemporary
poets. Files of poetry from 20 classical poets were
provided by The Poetry Archives. Wendy was also the
project's Poet Personality Designer, and designed the
100 poet personalities that are included with the
program.

This implies that there could be at least two other potential factors that make the poems "look intelligent" here:
1) the particular pieces of poetry fed in to the program are carefully hand-selected to generate human-looking output
2) the poetry fed into the system could actually be *composed* in an optimal way so to produce interesting-looking output (output that owes more to the data entered than the code written)

Well, thanks for the conversational spur to look into this. It's been educational.


Artificial thought --
They call it intelligence;
I'm still better. Hah!

(Oops, forgot the nature theme to make it truly traditional.)

Winters' discontent --
a stark new competitor
arises. Shot down!

--LP


P.S. The above post was created by a wetware neural network going by the handle LinuxParanoid, an engineer by training with little education in poetry. The subject did learn how to write haiku in middle school but had no further education on the subject and has never pursued haiku as a hobby. Both haiku were written in under 2 minutes each, with the subject having written maybe one haiku in the last ten years on a lark.

The program he wrote is called "Cybernetic Poet." You can learn more about it or download a binary for Win95/98 off the net at his Cybernetic Poet website.

What, no source code? I suppose it'd be rather embarrassing if some random hacker fixed the bug that made the first line ("You broke my soul") a syllable too short and the last line ("The spirit of my lips") a syllable too long.

You're correct, I already know. I trust based on his past work that Dr. Kurzweil hasn't done something trivial. But just since you're so obnoxious, I'll go find out more about it.

...

The program he wrote is called "Cybernetic Poet." You can learn more about it or download a binary for Win95/98 off the net at his Cybernetic Poet website.

To summarize how it works:
RKCP uses the following aspects of the original authors
that were analyzed to create original poems: the (i)
words, (ii) word structures and sequence patterns
based on RKCP's language modeling techniques (while
attempting not to plagiarize the original word sequences
themselves), (iii) rhythm patterns, and (iv) overall poem
structure. There are also algorithms to maintain
thematic consistency through the poem. RKCP uses a
unique recursive poetry generation algorithm to achieve
the language style, rhythm patterns and poem structure
of the original authors that were analyzed, without
actually copying the original authors' writings.

He also has data for how his program fared on a limited poetry-based Turing Test. To summarize:

The above 28-question poetic Turing test was
administered to 16 human judges with varying degrees
of computer and poetry experience and knowledge. The
13 adult judges scored an average 59 percent correct in
identifying the computer poem stanzas, 68 percent
correct in identifying the human poem stanzas, and 63
percent correct overall. The three child judges scored
an average of 52 percent correct in identifying the
computer poem stanzas, 42 percent correct in
identifying the human poem stanzas, and 48 percent
correct overall.


Sure, he gave the program a pretty high-quality input too (i.e. Keats); this isn't just the algorithms showing. I find it a good example that the converse of Garbage-in-garbage-out is true.

What surprised me about that particular poem was that it was actually better (IMHO) than something I could have written. I'm used to that in chess, but not in poetry. That's not a Turing test, but I'd argue its a pretty damn relevant test.

--LP

You're correct, I already know. I trust based on his past work that Dr. Kurzweil hasn't done something trivial. But just since you're so obnoxious, I'll go find out more about it.

...

The program he wrote is called "Cybernetic Poet." You can learn more about it or download a binary for Win95/98 off the net at his Cybernetic Poet website.

To summarize how it works:
RKCP uses the following aspects of the original authors
that were analyzed to create original poems: the (i)
words, (ii) word structures and sequence patterns
based on RKCP's language modeling techniques (while
attempting not to plagiarize the original word sequences
themselves), (iii) rhythm patterns, and (iv) overall poem
structure. There are also algorithms to maintain
thematic consistency through the poem. RKCP uses a
unique recursive poetry generation algorithm to achieve
the language style, rhythm patterns and poem structure
of the original authors that were analyzed, without
actually copying the original authors' writings.

He also has data for how his program fared on a limited poetry-based Turing Test. To summarize:

The above 28-question poetic Turing test was
administered to 16 human judges with varying degrees
of computer and poetry experience and knowledge. The
13 adult judges scored an average 59 percent correct in
identifying the computer poem stanzas, 68 percent
correct in identifying the human poem stanzas, and 63
percent correct overall. The three child judges scored
an average of 52 percent correct in identifying the
computer poem stanzas, 42 percent correct in
identifying the human poem stanzas, and 48 percent
correct overall.


Sure, he gave the program a pretty high-quality input too (i.e. Keats); this isn't just the algorithms showing. I find it a good example that the converse of Garbage-in-garbage-out is true.

What surprised me about that particular poem was that it was actually better (IMHO) than something I could have written. I'm used to that in chess, but not in poetry. That's not a Turing test, but I'd argue its a pretty damn relevant test.

--LP