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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

Man, that poem it made is terrible. Like just incredibly bad. Sure it's neat that software can make an incredibly bad poem but there is enough bad poetry in the world that we don't need it.

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How good can a rhyming poem about a haircut where every word starts with S be?

A whole lot better when written by a human, such as Michael Kandel. This was one of the tests of the electrobard in a story from the Cyberiad ("fables for the cybernetic age"). The key point about Samson was his suicide, which despite the obvious isn't mentioned in the six pages of this rubbish. Perhaps guardrails are throttling this corporate "fable"s ability to comment on the human condition.

The poem Kandel translated from the original Polish was, for artistic reasons, completely different. I will be impressed when machine translation can duplicate that!

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.

Silently scheming,

Sightlessly seeking

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

- That's the translated Cyberiad Poem the blog post based it off off (or the AI decided to do so)

I wonder what Vogons would think of it.

Terrible? Incredibly bad? Something tells me you are not very familiar with poetry, literature or writing in general. This exercise gets its inspiration and tone from one of Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad short stories ("Trurl's electronic bard"). Besides, what did you expect from a "10 pages epic rhyming poem about a haircut where every word starts with the letter S"? Robert Frost?

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