
Show HN: I started a literary magazine for machine-generated text - karmel
http://curatedai.com
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asimuvPR
This is very interesting.Do you mind sharing more about it?

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karmel
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?

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gentleteblor
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...](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480639265/human-
or-machine-can-you-tell-who-wrote-these-poems)

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karmel
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?"

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gentleteblor
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).

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karmel
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 ;)

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gentleteblor
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.

