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Kurzweil Gets A Patent For Poetic Software
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."
Maybe that's why those darned Vogons are so intent on building that hyperspace bypass here...
Here is a link to the site where you can download this program.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Now my computer's going to get laid more then me.
Poetic justice is pending.
/usr/games/fortune -o limerick
The first refernce: Patent for "Method and apparatus for generating text", 1987.
.backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other and are placed in a first rhyme set, while "go" and "know" are numbered .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other, and not with "lamb" and "slam," and thus are numbered to indicate membership in a second rhyme set. The resulting poem is; why go .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash.slam.ba ckslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..backsla sh..backslash., know .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. the lamb .backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash..
The following is an actual paragraph from the newly announced patent:
Referring to FIG. 4, table 56 having words and their associated rhyme numbering is shown for the poem "why go slam, know the lamb." The words "lamb" and "slam" are both numbered
I can't go on.... I can't see how the patent system is anything but a joke, one that does good for nobody but the lawyers.
...I keep getting the same poem.
A patent has been granted
Giving backing to my lines,
So if you write some similar code
You'll face some hefty fines.
My haiku:
Tonight On Slashdot
Kurzweil Poetry Machine
Please don't mod me down
... Maybe I shouldn't quit my day job.
I planned on inserting something witty here but never got around to it.
And the best part is it only takes 556 gigs of reference material to do something along the lines of "the cat is fat".
I'm unimpressed.
It's AI seems only capable of duplicating style...but it turns out peoms that make no sense. It seems to have no concept of word relationships, outside of simple grammar and organization.
Like I said, gimme Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson...who needs this?
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
Properly speaking, that is, in Japanese, haiku are not specified in terms of syllables. They're specified in terms of moras (Japanese onsetsu), the things of which a light syllable has one and a heavy syllable has two (or occasionally three). For example, here's a well known classic haiku:
na ra na na eshi chi doo ga ran
ya e za ku ra
I've broken it down into syllables. As you can see, there are five in each line. The reason this is well-formed is that the syllable doo counts as two moras since it has a long vowel and the syllable ran counts as two moras since it has a closing consonant. So the second line contains seven moras even though it only contains five syllables. In sum, a haiku is a poem whose lines contain 5, 7, and 5 moras. How this should translate into English I don't know. Personally, I think English "haiku" sound funny and favor sticking to Japanese.
I, for one,
welcome our
new cybernetic
poet overlords.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Here you go, W.C.Williams....
So much (i.e. my
Pulitzer)
depends upon an ambiguous
statement
with no actual
application
beside a bland
image
--
That's mine. Oh, and here's one from my lit book, by Kenneth Koch, tearing apart the silly Plums one
"Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams"
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you have been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
--
No, the patent is overkill. W.C.W. could be replaced with a very short shell script.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
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...
We should just take already existing poems, have them translated into Japanese, and then have the Japanese translate it back into English. Put it all together and voila!:
All your base are belong to us.
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
I can't believe noone yet mentioned Stanislav
Lem. One his more humorous stories dealt with
a similar machine though one that could
produce real poetry, meaningful, beautifully
written and confroming to arbitrary constraints,
like one where all words had to begin with same
letter. If you read the story you know this
invention will lead to no good.
...that in granting Kurzweil a patent on software that composes poetry, the government has issued him a poetic license?
Or perhaps it's simply poetic justice that such a seemingly silly patent should be issued.
No matter how bad things were already, with the advent of digital poetry, I can't help but think that things have gotten a bit verse.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
(In Brooklyn accent) I gotcher classics right here: Here I sit, all broken-hearted. Tried to SCO, but only farted.
Maybe that's why those darned Vogons are so intent on building that hyperspace bypass here...
You're spot on, but for the wrong reason. The Vogons never really considered the Kurzweil poet AI as worthy competition for their poetry, but this possibility did give the mice an excellent excuse for having the Earth destroyed while hiding the real reason why this had to be done.
Because you see, earlier in the experiment that led to the creation of planet Earth, a catastrophic error was made: they forgot to weed out latent patent clerks from among the management consultants and telephone sanitizers that were sent off on Ark B, as a result of which by the end of the 2nd millennium the planet was completely overrun with demented patent clerks that brought all technical progress to a standstill.
While some computer scientists (well, OK, just Bill Joy) declared this to be conclusive proof for the Halting Problem, all sentient life everywhere recognized the extreme danger of Earth's patent clerk infecting the rest of the universe with insanity, so planetary termination became non-optional.
The Vogons were of course happy to carry out the task, but their fondness for hyperspace bypasses really had nothing to do with it. To understand the Vogon eagerness to destroy Earth, you just need to consider the fact that patent clerks cannot distinguish original poetry from age-old nursery rhymes, and being non-sentient, nor can they feel the sadistic pain of Vogon poetry recitals. Put those two things together and it was only a question of which Vogon captain would reach Earth first. Even without the benefit of a Vogon background, it's easy to see their point.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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.:
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?