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Kurzweil Gets A Patent For Poetic Software

Posted by timothy on from the rhymin'-and-stealin' dept.

theodp writes "Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind, has developed what he calls a cybernetic poet, software that allows a computer to create poetry by imitating but not plagiarizing the styles and vocabularies of human poets. A sample: 'Sashay down the page...through the lioness...nestled in my soul.' Impressed? The USPTO, who sponsored the Independent Inventors Conference Mr. Kurzweil spoke at on Nov. 17, seems to be. On Nov. 11, Ray Kurzweil received U.S. Patent No. 6,647,395 for Poet Personalities."

3 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Slightly OT, but both /. and poetry-related by bersl2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wrote a poem for English class once. It was one of those deals where I didn't have anything to write about. So I started reading Slashdot. This was at the time where there were three Palladium/TCPA/WTF-it's-now stories a day, as opposed to three SCO stories a day. To make a long story short, I wrote one of those poems that wasn't about Palladium, but really it was. Damn, I thought I had just written an absolute POS.

    I was very surprised when my English teacher really liked it. She liked it so much that she entered it in a state-wide contest for high school students.

    Yeah. Well, my poem won. So I get to read it at the sponsoring organization's next meeting. I go there and, of course, I see that my poem had been selected as the best by none other than old ladies and somewhat-less-than-straight men. One of the old ladies told me that my entry was one of the more "interesting" ones she'd seen.

    So, uh, yeah... that's my story...

  2. Problems with computer poetry as a sign of intel.. by LinuxParanoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Eschewing the patent issue for a moment and focusing on the question of whether poetry consitutes artificial intelligence, the question is: whose intelligence?

    I read Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines and he had various samples of computer poetry there. I remember thinking that one of them was stunningly good, at least to my taste.

    But I also found myself wondering... how many (hundreds of? thousands of?) poems were discarded by humans in an attempt to find a couple good ones, and is this vaunted computer poetry really mostly a product of human selection from reams of pseudo-sensical word combinations? I never saw any disclosure or discussion of these sorts of factors in Kurzweil's writings. Keep your eye out for this.

    --LP

  3. How is this different/better than Racter? by cout · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In the 80's a man by the name of William Chamberlain wrote a program called Racter , which had the ability to write poetry. Racter even has a book out called The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed.

    Racter had two serious objections. For one, Racter's poetry sounds much like the ramblings of a madman, e.g.:

    • Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting

    The other serious objection people have to Racter is that because the author had such a strong influence on the parameters used to generate the poetry that he is the true author and not the computer.

    If these same objections can be applied to Kurzweil's work, then the cybernetic poet is no better than Racter and isn't particularly interesting. According to the article, the author claims that his program is more sophisticated than other software out there, but the article doesn't include any specific comparisons.

    Is this really a major leap forward or is this just another stab at artificial insanity?