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Comment by gentleteblor | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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