
Human or Machine: Can You Tell Who Wrote These Poems? - evo_9
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480639265/human-or-machine-can-you-tell-who-wrote-these-poems
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beloch
6/6, and I didn't read more than half-way through most of these. What's the
tell? Focus. The human-written poetry develops a single, coherent subject with
each passing line. Each new line adds new light to the ones that preceded it.
Any single line of the machine written sonnets, considered alone, might appear
to be written by a human but, when taken together, they simply don't add up.
The progression of a single idea just isn't there.

I freakin' hate poetry. Give me prose or give me epigrams! To me, a poem is an
awkward combination of prose without clarity and and epigram too bloated to be
stated succinctly. I point this out, because I want to be taken seriously when
I say that this machine-written poetry is bad in a way that makes me
appreciate human poetry just a little bit more.

~~~
kazinator
Same here! 6/6 within five minutes. The computer ones are just laughable
gibberish, reminiscent of word salad generation from some 1993 dated Perl
tutorial.

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blowski
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.

~~~
SilasX
Right, because you have to convince the high-status authorities to say that it
connects on an emotional level so that everyone else will nod their heads to
avoid looking stupid.

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.

~~~
Scriptor
I'm not a high-status authority and I was still able to connect emotionally to
the human ones. Or, at the very least, each line contributed to a consistent
mental picture or idea.

~~~
r00fus
I found an overarching theme or message above and beyond the words in the
human written ones (guess 5 of 6 correctly). This isn't just a theme tying
together the lines, it's more of an arc of understanding.

Of course, I did incorrectly guess that one of the poems was written by a
machine, when it was a human.

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thebladerunner
This is another variation of the Turing test. Time to realize: the Turing test
is useless because: (a)the goal is to game the jury and (b) humans don't
necessarily make sense either (example: bad or even just confusing poetry) so
the human baseline is not always well-defined. Need Turing Test 2.0

~~~
thaumasiotes
I found a website once advertising "have a conversation with me or my chatbot,
and try to guess who it is".

My counterparty quickly made some bizarre grammatical errors, prompting me to
guess "chatbot" and be rewarded with a screen saying "No, you fool! See,
telling the difference is harder than you think!"

Telling the difference between a robot and a human pretending to be that robot
is apparently viewed as a Turing test, but it isn't actually the same thing.

Similarly, there's a Turing test that's run every year with very strict rules
on what you can and can't say to the other side. This defeats the idea of the
test (while making the _event_ less nonsensical, in that the rules allow for
people to misidentify chatbots some of the time).

I guess my point is, your point (a) is an artifact of a certain culture that's
trying to appropriate the concept of a Turing test so that they can declare
they've beaten it. Point (b) is better.

~~~
p1esk
Turing Test is a personal experience. For example, I will only believe TT has
been passed if I personally had a chance to talk to the "Entity Under Test",
and I can't tell it's human or not. I don't really care whether other people
have been fooled or not.

Obviously, the EUT should be, or pretend to be, my intellectual peer (e.g.
similar education, age, social status, country, etc). It should be a native
English speaker, or at least as fluent as I am. I should be able to converse
with EUT for as long as I need to (several conversations if needed, perhaps
limited to a couple of weeks).

Most importantly, the human participants should be motivated to convince me
they are human (e.g. they only get paid if they manage to do so).

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daveguy
As others have mentioned, lack of an overall theme is an easy way to
distinguish the human from machine poetry.

Keep in mind, the machine poems are those hand selected by humans, twice
filtered -- this publication and the original publication. That means these
poems have a high degree of coherency that you wouldn't otherwise see.

People are reporting 6/6 ability to distinguish. If you had a person and an
algorithm each generate two (or even one) poem without any filtration from a
field of poems then it would be even more obvious which was machine and which
was human.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Unfortunately the problem reduces to qualia. Poems that have a theme evoke the
experience of that theme. Likewise for generative music and art.

If you have no model for experience (it doesn't have to be metaphysical -
something mechanical would do) you can't include that element in the output.

Except by accident - which is how Deep Dream works. The designers found a
model that was good at mimicking a certain kind of experience - partly through
luck, and partly through analogy.

But Deep Dream is limited to that one kind of trippy experience. It's very
good at it, but a competent human artist has a much wider range. [1]

Real AI creativity needs a system that can mimic that much wider range - so
you'll never be sure what _kind_ of human experience you'll get from it.

[1] Sometimes. A surprising proportion of professional artists repeat the same
theme, style, or imagery over and over. But that's sometimes because of
commercial pressure - when you find a formula that sells, experimenting with a
formula that might not isn't always wise.

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sandworm101
Poetry is the literary equivalent of minimalist painting. The machine is doing
just enough, or as little as possible to tick the boxes needed to make the art
identifiable as art. But art only exists in context. These poems' only value
is that they have come from a machine, just as many paintings derive most of
their value from the person who paints them. They are interesting, but as art
they are next to worthless because the process of their creation is so easily
replicated.

This is art:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IKB_191.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IKB_191.jpg)

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khrm
I find poems given at [http://botpoet.com](http://botpoet.com) by bots to be a
bit better. Above one are completely incoherent. Haiku would be probably more
easier to generate.

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aaron695
If a machine writes 1000 poems and a human chooses the best one did the
machine make a poem with emotion or a human?

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suprgeek
I see a future where as the "rise of the machines" takes hold in things like
News Items, Stories, Poetry, Paintings, Movies etc, there will be a
commensurate rise in Detection software. The detection software would flag
things as human-generated vs machine-generated.

Pretty soon anything created by Humans will be intrinsically more valuable
just because it was human-created and hence somehow better than "machine-
generated".

We live in interesting times...

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cel1ne
I read only the ending rhyme of every sonnet => 6/6.

~~~
suprfnk
I really doubt if you only read this sentence (last sentence of sonnet #2)
you'd know it's a machine:

    
    
        A thousand pictures on the kitchen floor,
        Talked about a hundred years or more.
    

If you don't know what's written in the preceding sections, this could very
well be written by a human.

~~~
cel1ne
Oh you're right,

I read upwards at that poem and looked at the ending words of the sentences.
Decided that the combination "tripping" / "dripping" wasn't very poetic. ->
machine.

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sid-
Maybe we should have a machine learning algorithm do this ? :)

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kamingme
But if there aren't human examples that machine couldn't write poems. They are
just mimicking within the samples and structures.

