Poetry that scans correctly should be fairly easy to write for a machine - just find words with the right rhythm patterns and rhymes. Poetry that connects on an emotional level must be a lot harder.
I didn't even read that far. It was obvious by here:
SONNET #2
The dirty rusty wooden dresser drawer.
A couple million people wearing drawers,
Or looking through a lonely oven door,
Flowers covered under marble floors.
Every human poem in this example has a high level theme, which is non-obvious to a computer. None of the computer ones do.
"Last night I heard lepers
flinch like birth defects
its musk was fecal in origin
as the words dribbled off of its chin
it said I'm lost
I'm lost
Now I'm lost
Dolls wreck the minced meat of pupils
cast in oblong arms length
the hooks have been picking their scabs
where wolves hide in the company of men
it said I'm lost
I'm lost"Actually, you can kind of reverse engineer the algorithm behind Sonnet #2. It seems like they first pick a bunch of related words that rhyme (drawer, door, floors, apartment, wall) and then build up the line backwards. The problem is that even though the words are related, the actual lines don't form any single cohesive image.
Because human poets never do wordplay like that?
There is no such link made in this example between the usages.
But no, it's just that all the bad poets in the original article were machines in the end.
Truly, AI is a long way from beating the Emperor's New Clothes game.
But frankly, there are easier, more useful AI goals to target.
Honest question -- did you get the same emotional read off of the machine-poems as you did the human-poems? If not, perhaps there is something more involved in poetry than stringing words together!
Yep -- none.
Take Sonnet #6 for example. You can tell there is intelligence behind the sentences being written. Each line builds on the line before it. Compare to sonnet #5 which rambles on about nothing and uses duplicate words (then comes a small bright spark comes)...
Sonnet 1 was about a person mourning their mother who died in a car accident. It read well and made sense, so I would have been very surprised if it were written by a machine.
Sonnet 2 didn't make sense, but more than that there were very awkward constructs. Rhyming "drawer" (the furniture) with "door" and "drawers" (the undergarments) with "floors" in the same quatrain reads very poorly. "Sergeant" does not rhyme with "apartment".
Sonnet 3 was about something (a growing plant), and it reads well, so it was written by a human.
Sonnet 4 was about something (Joy, a personification of the emotion), and it read well. "Joy" being consistently capitalized throughout was a subtlety that convinced me it was written by a human.
Sonnet 5 had more awkward constructs. "Shame" and "Tame", "Inflame" and "Came" in the same stanza. "Bring" and "wandering" don't really rhyme. The last stanza is just weird -- "hear" is supposed to rhyme with "cheer", "cheers" (which is the line right before "cheer"...) is supposed to rhyme with "roars" (?), and "nights" is supposed to rhyme with "respects"? Again, it didn't really make any sense.
Sonnet 6 was similar to Sonnet 3. It's about something (a growing plant again), and it reads well again.
Generally, there's a poem (more than one even) to fit any person's taste. patio11 has quoted one before, which is meaningful to him:
I went to find the pot of gold
that's waiting where the rainbow ends
I searched and searched and searched and searched
and searched and searched, and then
there it was, deep in the grass
under an old and twisty bough
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine at last
What do I search for now?
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation
for fear they should succumb and go astray
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested
you will find it better policy to say:
We never pay anyone Dane-geld, no matter how trifling the cost
For the end of that game is oppression and shame
and the nation that plays it is lost!
All along that singing river, that black mass of men was seen
High above their shining weapons flew their own beloved green
Death to every foe and traitor, whistle out the marching tune
And our army buys her freedom at the rising of the moon
The problem comes in with an upper-class movement to distinguish themselves from the rubes who appreciate good poetry by removing all the things that make it good. The problem SilasX identifies is real, and you can earn a lot of acclaim today writing awful, rhythmless, rhymeless, themeless stuff and calling it poetry. Compounding the problem, this terrible high-prestige form is what you'll learn about if you decide to take a poetry class. But we shouldn't let it ruin our view of what poetry can be.
While there are classes in post-modern poetry, most poetry classes are not that.
How many poetry classes have you taken?
I did a degree in English lit. The poetry classes I took looked something like this:
- Old and Middle English Poetry (Beowulf, Chaucer, etc.)
- Elizabethan Poetry
- Paradise Lost
- The Shakespearean Sonnet
- 18th Century Classicism (Alexander Pope, etc.)
- Victorian Poetry (Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, etc.)
- 20th Century Irish Poetry (Yeats, that kind of thing)
- 20th Century American Modernism
Only in the last class was there was anything like you described, and even then it only made up a fraction of the material covered.
Here is one of the most critically acclaimed poems of the last 40 years. It's perfectly easy to understand. http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/a-martian-sends-a-post...
Did you recognise, for instance, that the first poem is the poet's recollection of cancer ravaging her mother, and of how she walked to the hospital every day to see her?
Did you understand and just not care, or did you not understand and so find nothing to care about?
Of course, I did incorrectly guess that one of the poems was written by a machine, when it was a human.
I found a lot of the lines from The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed by the program Racter to connect with me on an emotional level, despite knowing that (a) it was likely heavily edited by the program creator and (b) much of it just mimicked the unusual word choices and rhythmic qualities of poetry, not the intentional conveyance of a message or theme.
By editing 200 lines into just 3 or 4, you are actually adding a lot of information. It makes the computer seem smarter than it is.
If we could create a "good poem" evaluator + editor and tack it on the end of a "random poem" creator, we could perhaps get some good results.
Consumers. The best art affects a lot of people. And they don't need to be told to like it. It "just works."
Art audiences follow multivariate statistical distributions. It's very much not just a personal reaction - it's a personal reaction shared by many other people having broadly similar reactions.
Some of it is social signalling, and some of it requires education and experience.
But valued works tend to persist in culture because they reliably create reactions in a statistically significant proportion of all possible audiences.
Indeed, Pentametron [0] ('With algorithms subtle and discreet/I seek iambic writings to retweet') has been up since 2012. Despite the occasional serendipitous pairing, it obviously doesn't make much sense, as didn't the obvious machine-poems in TFA.