Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
On the one hand we have highly informational content such as the one about the earthquake, earnings report and sports game. Reporting on this kind of information can be done in a context free way. Sentences and paragraphs can be self contained and need not reference each other or greater contexts. I only missed the sports game in part because I'm not an American and was not familiar with the game involved. In hindsight the earnings reports stands out from the others since much broader connections are made then just reporting the raw information itself.
On the other hand we have poetry, which is often so hard to parse that nonsense and genius are hard to tell apart, especially for short excerpts like these. I missed the poetry app one because although it read like nonsense for me, as a non native speaker much of these Shakespearean poems do on first sight. I don't know exactly why but "True Love" and "Absurdistan" immidetly stuck me as fake and real respectivly. For example I thought it was weird to be that her nerves where strained as two tight strings, and that someone would make her drink hot wine. Also the "True Love" excerpt seems very factual and deseperate where "Absurdistan" paints more of an atmosphere.
It could also do vanity articles. Go back to your college days and write about your games, making you the highlight.
Worse it could be influenced to do personalized advertisements in the middle of the article.
Hot wine is very much a thing (and it's delicious)! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulled_wine
If it's defined to be "written by a human", then I bet that most (all?) of their examples are written by a human in a similar way.
If it's defined to be "written by a computer", then guessing if a human or a computer wrote any of their examples is like guessing the output of coin tossing.
But what about if we define entropy in terms of something like parts of speech? Then, the computer can only change one part of speech (the noun phrase to which we compare a summer's day) whilst maintaining the context of the sentence, so in terms of that metric, entropy is low.
With this parts of speech entropy metric in hand maybe we could declare the output of a computer to be "written by a computer" if the entropy in its sentences approaches that of a human writing about the same topic.
Disclaimer: I spent about as much time thinking about this as you did just reading it, so I don't expect this is in any way a fully formed or implementable idea, just food for thought.