Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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'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
I don't understand how this poetry generator constitutes an AI.
That's because it doesn't. This program is on the same complexity scale as chapter 2 or 3 in an introduction to programming book, when it reaches the concept of variables. It's an exercise in triviality, not artificial intelligence.
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.
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!
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.
Here is a Haiku By a Robot from Highlights Magazine.
Seven Hundred Ten
Seven Hundred Eleven
Seven Hundred Twelve
https://twitter.com/zachwhalen...
>> 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).
"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!
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.