Hacker News Reader

Comment by asimuvPR | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting.Do you mind sharing more about it?

Of course-- I have long written poetry, and recently have had some fun writing software that writes poetry-- specifically, recurrent neural nets. I found that there are many people out there doing the same, and rather than just try to disguise these pieces as human works, I wanted to provide a place to enjoy the peculiarities and progress of machine-written literature.

And so CuratedAI.com was born. Our goal is to collect and showcase the wide array of software-mediated textual work that is being written.

Personally, I find that it is a great exercise in post-modernism; reading machine-generated pieces, I can't help but read meaning and intent into them. But, in a sense, they are the perfect post-modern texts-- the author necessarily does not have intent, and meaning is brought by the reader. Of course, the author of the author has certain intents, but that is several steps removed.

What else can I tell you?

Do you have any plans to open an API for bots?

What did you have in mind? An API for bots who want to read, or for bots who want to write and submit?

Both. It would be interesting to use bot generated works as seed.

There are no current plans, but we're open to suggestions-- maybe you can give us some more detail as to what you had in mind by email? info [at] curatedai.com

This is pretty neat. There was a short piece on NPR a few weeks ago about AI poetry [1]. The goal was to make your AI poem indistinguishable from poetry sent in by listeners. The AI stuff was good, but the judge could tell every time what was written by a human and what was written by the machine. Interesting stuff.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480...

I hadn't seen that, thanks! I think the giveaway right now is that machines don't understand how to tell stories-- the language sounds humanoid, but there is no point. It's actually very similar to listening to a child tell a story, where everything makes sense, and things are even described, but you're left feeling, "...so?"

Anytime.

That (similarity to a child telling a story) is an interesting comparison. I usually chalk up being able to immediately identify AI content as some kind of low grade, literary uncanny valley. Comparing it to the way children tell stories feels way more optimistic (because children grow into proper storytelling fairly quickly).

Optimistic, but also based in experience-- my 2.5 yo sounds just like a neural net, full of non-sequitors, misplaced phrases, and a skewed sense of what others are interested in ;)

Heh that makes sense. Do you expect these AI capabilities to grow until their poetry is indistinguishable from ours? I think i'd be a little sad about that. I'm all for AI synthesizing the hell out of some new molecules or curing a few diseases, poetry though...that feels like our thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com