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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...
I agree it doesn't really do anything to advance the state of AI.
For example I could program my computer to make Rorschach inkblot patterns relatively easily, and many of them would be pleasing to the eye, and people would see flowers, butterflys, erotica, and nightmares in them.
But the computer didn't put those ideas there, and it doesn't make the computer program an artist.
An artist has something to say; the computer doesn't.
This display raises and makes clear the disconnect between the artists message and the viewers response and shows us clearly that the viewer can have a significant response to a piece even if there was no message at all; provided the viewer is "primed" to look for one.
This is an issue I have with much art, especially minimalist abstract art ... where I genuinely doubt the artist did anything of substance at all, and is merely relying on the viewer to project significance and meaning into it by suggesting it is "art" therefore there MUST be some, and if you can't see it then the fault must be your own inadequacy. The emperors new cloths of the art world so-to-speak.
This poem is in the same vein. It is sufficiently complicated and constructed of phrases of words that are semantically related so that if we are primed to look for meanings, then like a Rorschach inkblot, we can find one.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.
Yet, all that doesn't imply there is really anything wrong with college poetry though. The poets are learning to express themselves... perhaps somewhat awkwardly. And that awkwardness is part of the total expression. And that's fine.
Let me know when the AI is trying to actually express an idea and the result is poetic. Of course, for that the AI would actually need an idea to express.
All this one has is some word soup and some methods for selecting them involving some sort of semantic grouping so they seem to be thematic, some loose grammer rules to put them next to each other; and maybe some loose poem structural templates or something ... or maybe not.
Also, there's no interaction here, and this isn't the first instance of computer-generated content making it through human filters. There was an article a while ago about submissions to scientific journals... I think this is the story: http://www.nature.com/news/pub...
In both cases, the content was "complete gibberish," not coherent submissions. These stories don't demonstrate the progress of AI; they demonstrate the low expectations of "meaningful," that judges/editors have in specific circumstances.
That said, there is compelling computer-generated content, such as this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere