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The Poem That Passed the Turing Test
merbs writes In 2011, the editors of one of the nation's oldest student-run literary journals selected a short poem called "For the Bristlecone Snag" for publication in its Fall issue. The poem seems environmentally themed, strikes an aggressive tone, and contains a few of the clunky turns of phrase overwhelmingly common to collegiate poetry. It's unremarkable, mostly, except for one other thing: It was written by a computer algorithm, and nobody could tell.
I think that says more about crappy college poetry than the state of computer AI...
More a condemnation of collegiate poetry than a credit to the program, really.
WTF has become of /.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's much easier for a computer to get away with writing a poem than prose. The modern trend is to write poetry that sounds cool but no one understands. The same is true for modern songwriting.
P. S. Now get off my lawn.
From TFA: The 'author' submittted numerous poems to a number of publishers, the great majority of which were rejected. The one that was accepted was accepted to a journal that was to 'showcase a breadth of authors and a breadth of styles.' Really if you're going to publish computer-generated literature, that would be the place to do it.
I think it may say more about the quality and style of that type of poetry than it does about the quality of the AI.
She knocked something over in way that was difficult to distinguish from human action at first glance. I presume that's what the Turing test means these days, since all these "X passed the Turing test!" headlines never seem to relate to anything that approaches what Turing actually proposed.
It's unremarkable, mostly, except for one other thing: It was written by a computer algorithm, and nobody cares..
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Or nobody could care?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It didn't happen in this case, but if your computer algorithm churned out 10,000 "poems" and you or a team of people sifted through them to find the ones that sounded like they were written by a person, then submitted them for publication without telling anyone that 99.99% of the computer's output had been discarded by a person before submission, it would hit /. with a similar article title.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Its been some years since I took AI in college, but I recall the turning test being an interactive one where a person is supposed to engage on conversation over a terminal with something on the other end and determine if its a person or computer. So if I remember right, this is not a turing test pass at all. And quite honestly, to write an algorithm to generate a poem that looks like a humans work, with unlimited time and then post it to see if anyone can tell is a much easier test to pass.
I don't understand how this poetry generator constitutes an AI. It doesn't have any component that even remotely has to do with artificial intelligence.
Yet again /. managed to fail the Turing Test.
David Langford of Ansible fame has a remarkably compelling poetry generator footnoted on his site. The code is over 20 years old. Sorry, no link in this post due to mobile limitations. Suggestion: use it to generate /. Replies...
Who gets the copyright? (I'm on a public network that blocks many websites and cannot RTFA)
I've seen plenty of poetry that was written by humans but I couldn't tell.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
It's all about the Cumberbatch Test now. Something to do with perfect hair and a square jaw...and AI...or something...
Publishing a poem is not a conversation. Worse, poetry is expected to be artsy gibberish that would raise red flags in a real conversation.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm." This is not a poem, it is a collection of words assembled according to the algorithm. It may resemble a poem but it is definitely not an expression of feelings or ideas.
Virtual monkeys with typewriters reproduced the complete works of Shakespeare. Does that pass the Turing test?
This is a meta-Turing test: Post something on /. about a computer doing something vaguely 'human' under the title of a machine passing a Turing test and see which posters believe it. Those people are just python scripts.
Bonus points for using a quasi 'AI' program to auto generate said stories...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I could tell it was fake immediately.
... because poetry.
The point is that a computer probably generated a whole lot of poetry, and some poor human had to sift through it and pick the least awful poem. So, really, it's a human who did all the hard work anyway. You give enough monkeys enough typewriters, and hire some humans to sort through their "work" and you will eventually get something interesting too.
... and the quality of human-written crap dipped low enough to converge with previously distinct computer-written crap.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Here is a Haiku By a Robot from Highlights Magazine.
Seven Hundred Ten
Seven Hundred Eleven
Seven Hundred Twelve
https://twitter.com/zachwhalen...
"I expect the Slashdot title was written by a human."
No, you don't.
..that quotes from 'The Random Depak Chopra Quote Generator' being indistinguishable from actual Depak Chopra quotes has achieved this already as a reflection of sub empirical quantum choices shows... Or is it that Depak Chopra cannot pass the Turing test and is actually a cleverly disguised TRS80.
>> a program that utilized a context-free grammar system to spit out full-length, auto-generated poems. ./ crowd (hardly), then SCIgen is worth mentioning as well. Heck, SCIgen-generated garbage passed as a good science, not just some lousy "poetry".
Well, if context-free grammar is somehow a news for
Writing some clunky pseudo-poetry for an obscure undergrad mag is one thing, pumping out a full-blown scientific article with figures and references (and getting accepted to some peer-reviewed journals!) is quite another level of achievements. And speaking about achievements, SCIgen is routinely used to embarrass those corporative paper shills from Elsevier (yay, Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation!) and IEEE (WMSCI 2005).
This seems to have more in common with fridge magnet 'poetry' or Mad Libs than the process of composing real poetry.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
"You wound me, sir!" the AI cried,
"For student I am not.
In terms of prose and poetry
More than you've learned, have I forgot.
Yet you compare me to the fools
Whose minds through college rot?
The only insult worse would be
An editor of Slashdot."
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Didn't Clippy pass the Turing test years ago? I was convinced for a really long time that Clippy was a real person just trying to help me out. How crestfallen I was to learn the truth.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
What we need now is a poem written by a collecge student that sounds like it was written by a computer. No, wait. That's aready been done lots of times.
There is an entire branch of poetry that uses computers to generate poems, though I can't recall if it has a particular name. (I think it might just be computer-generated poetry) So not only is this not about the Turing test, not novel, it's not even subversive: You could be a legitimate poet and do this very thing, and no one would bat an eye. Though I imagine a legitimate poet would have a better success rate with their (computer generated) submissions.
because it is too knowledgeable, when you ask it very specific questions about a wide range of domains. No single person is that good, and we would know that.
That's one of the reason's why the Turing test is not a terribly useful test for presence of intelligence.
Why should a computer have to simulate human knowledge gaps and attention-wanderings and unjustified personalizations of answers, typical of human conversation, in order to be considered to have intelligence?
And no. It's not the human contributors of the answers who are responsible for Google being able to answer your specific question. It's the google algorithm and digital memory structures which are answering your question, based on a very general process of matching your new input (the query) against lots of related memorized old input (the knowledge base).
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Written by Zackary Scholl when he wrote the program that generated the poem.
Not all that new. We've been LISPing out poetry and prose using List Processing since the 1970's. It looks like it was written by a person. We even made algorithms that mimicked specific famous individuals's style of writing. Most people just listen and not but can't tell the difference.
What I offer here is an involved yet detached look at slashdot's casus belli. Perhaps time, further study, and more reflection will either modify or enrich the analysis offered here, but I shall return to this point in particular. Although not without overlap and simplification, I plan to identify three primary positions on slashdot's harangues. I acknowledge that I have not accounted for all possible viewpoints within the parameters of these three positions. Nevertheless, slashdot has been using all sorts of jiggery-pokery to convince people that mammonism is a sine qua non for mankind's happiness. That worldview may be appealing, at least to the worst types of unctuous schmucks I've ever seen, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps more painfully, slashdot will probably throw another hissy fit if we don't let it bamboozle people into believing that the future of the entire world rests in its hands. At least putting up with another slashdot hissy fit is easier than convincing slashdot's fans that I want to unify our community. Slashdot, in contrast, wants to drive divisive ideological wedges through it.
Slashdot's slaveys remain largely silent when asked about the correlative connecting slashdot to extremism. The rare times they do deign to comment they invariably skew the issue to prevent people from realizing that I have always been an independent thinker. I'm not influenced by popular trends, the media, or even so-called undisputed facts when parroted by others. Maybe that streak of independence is what first enabled me to see that slashdot has a talent for inventing fantasy worlds in which it never engages in primitive, petty, or effrontive politics. Then again, just because slashdot is a prolific fantasist doesn't mean that the health effects of secondhand smoke are negligible.
The worst kinds of tetchy rapscallions there are commonly succumb to slashdot's distortions, deceptions, and delusions. I do not. Rather, I take pride in dispensing justice. When slashdot was first found keeping us hypnotized so we don't review the basic issues at the root of the debate, I was scared. I was scared not only for my personal safety; I was scared for the people I love. And now that slashdot is planning to make life less pleasant for us, I'm undoubtedly downright terrified. I would like to end on a heartfelt note. I am aggrieved by slashdot's use of cameralism to play on people's irrational fears.
http://www.pakin.org/complaint...
A panel of human judges could not tell the difference between a baby pounding keys o a keyboard and an algorithm simulating a baby pounding keys on a keyboard. /s
The way to pass the Turing test is not to simulate humans when they are behaving the least like humans and tricking other humans. The spirit of the Turing Test is to create the conditions where it is the hardest to simulate other humans, and then see if a computer can pass.
Poems are not interactive. It is not hard for a computer to construct grammatically correct language. Hell it could just copy existing poems and perfectly simulate a human plagiarist.
The whole idea of the Turing test is that many things seem like they could be artifacts of thought, but all the artifacts of trickery break down when forced to be interactive enough. You might might be tricked into thinking a mannequin is a beautiful woman, until you try to interact with her.
It is actually incredibly simple to create a program to parse some text in a believable fashion. You feed it a ton of input and it tries to create something using similar rules, using statistics based on the input. We did that as an individual project in highschool CS. Even with those first order programs you got semi grammatically correct sentences. And since poems are weird and nonsensical anyways, I imagine if we has tried poetry, it would of produced some quite reasonable results.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Raymond Queneau :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Thousand_Billion_Poems
That speaks more to the stupidity of poems than passing any turing test
I think you meant "liberal arts", though poetry is not traditionally "liberal arts" but "communications/creative writing". "Art" like this is the reason I took one Art class in college and 9 semesters of Philosophy.
I am actually a decent painter, have been since I was a kid (I won numerous contests and sponsorships for free hand drawing, painting in mostly acrylics and oils). In my first year while trying to decide a major I took an "art" class, mostly to see if this was something I might pursue as a career. My professor was one of the guys that would call TFA's poem "Poetry". He loved modern art and the extremely abstract, hating anything from any other viewpoint. Each class he would parade his trashy piles of welded together pieces of metal crud, telling everyone what a great "artist" he was (though I don't believe he ever sold a single piece of work). For our midterm assignment he gave us an ink and board assignment for pointillism. Not seeing much I could make as "art" with his required 6-11 dots I went with his maximum 11 dots and had something that looked similar to a couple of birds at about 10ft away if you squinted. I received an E on the assignment. Meanwhile anyone that used 6 dots that looked like nothing received As on the project.
That was an eye opening experience for a young college student. Not only did I find "art" in college to be the single most subjective grading system, but the professors were absolute douche bags. I appealed my E to the Dean who brought in another "great" art professor who also said my 11 dots were excessive for a pointillism project. It was not what the dots appeared to be that counted, it was the emotion they believed I used when placing my dots that was wrong.
Needless to say my major was quickly chosen. I majored in Math and have a Minor in Liberal Arts (Philosophy). Further, fearing permanent brain damage I never strayed within 100ft of the Art Hall during the rest of my education. I saw what it did to those other "art" students, and I could only assume what the professors had was contagious.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Do...
That poem is just pure nonsense. This stunt says more about their poetry-IQ than the AI's IQ.
Like often seen in art, lots of people seem to have randomness in high regard, i never got that. I'd say it should have this quality also found in humor: connecting seemingly unrelated things, jolt me with eureka particles. To me, this poem is just connecting unrelated things. One could argue that i lack the understanding to see the connections, and i might not be part of the targeted audience.
Ofcourse each reader may have their own interpretation, and mine is that is doesnt qualify as something i'd call a poem.
Let me lift a few semi-random parts of this post to illustrate that by these standards, everything is a poem. Even if it means nothing.
So there is now software that writes poetry? There is already the MySong software from Microsoft Rersearch, which writes melody to harmoniously accompany a lyrics input. There is also software from Yamaha which sings those lyrics alongside the melody (now in human-quality english, thanks to yesterday's release of the 4th generation "Cyber Diva" Vocaloid).
Add a beautified Honda Asimo to this mix and the result should be an android which dreams of electric Lady Gaga. The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics opening ceremony should be interesting to watch...
You just have to lower the bar until meaningless trash is accepted as proof of intelligence.
The Turing Test is Interactive; Poems are Not. It's almost comedic how the Turing Test is misunderstood, misrepresented and suchlike.
John_Chalisque
A poem is passive. It can not pass the Turing test because of this.
with actually being the thing. Verisimilitude is not truth.
E Proelio Veritas.
Generate a bunch - and pick the best one - in a art-form where being inexact, and mysterious is considered "artistic license". This program could have generated 99.9999% garbage - selecting a single "good" poem from a single pass doesn't mean anything.
Computer generates initially plausible but factually incorrect summary to Slashdot. Over 70% of readers assume human Slashdot editor is terrible at his human job. Mission accomplished.
Of course, the standard has been lowered considerably. When asked about the meaning behind his work, the computer responded, "They're shocked by our harsh world -- the opposite of an apple... a higher consciousness. I do not care what people say; we make our own music." Everyone nodded, immediately recognizing the artistic influence of Jaden Smith."