But can poetry write a computer?

One big difference is that a computer, as he said, reflects what you give it, you give it Emily Dickinson, it gives you Emily Dickinson back, but if you give Emily Dickinson to a human, he/she will give you something totally different, their own idea that was inspired by the poet they had read

when a computer uses an algorithm to make a poem, is it not reflecting the writer of the algorythm?

Poetry, and art in general, is the artist conveying a message through a creative output. When Shakespeare wrote the famous Hamlet line, "To be or not to be, that is the question", he wanted the audience to have a deeper understanding of the character of Hamlet. If a computer writes that phrase, it is not conveying an artist's message, it is simply spouting words in a certain order based on algorithms. Until artificial intelligence can be achieved, a computer cannot create art because it will not grasp the concepts of symbolism and metaphor.

Is this guy for real? First of all, it's not a Turing test. It would be a Turing test if I could chat with the poem author about the meaning of his/her/its text. Just producing some text and having people determine if it's an algorithm that might even use some kind of template or if it's a human being trying to sound cryptic is not a good test for anything. Secondly, poems, even good ones, often do not speak to everyone. So just having a text where people go "huh, dunno, might as well be a machine" doesn't say anything. Show me a machine that can write a text that genuinely touches people and that doesn't use some kind of template and I'll be impressed. I haven't seen that in this talk.

No t yet.

Roses are red Violets are violet I can't write a poem Help

Really like the philosophical approach here, nerver thought about it like that. A lot of people do not even think about reconsidering their perspective on the relationship between humans, computers and their impact on each other

Poetry is inherently ambiguous and esoteric in nature and this 'test' lends itself to those attributes. The fact that most people have not studied poetry (which is a very dense and rich subject) makes it quite alien to most, again granting this 'test' an easier audience. I'd like to see a more objective and common approach to comparing AI with human scripts as opposed to those based on philosophy and existential thoughts.

Interesting talk; succinct and well delivered. This wasn't a talk about poetry or computers. It was a talk about some of the deeply existential questions we'll all be asking over the next couple decades.

What interests me is how you can easily figure out if a computer wrote a poem. In the first example, the computer's poem made no sense at all; it even had poor grammar. It was basically just trying to form a paragraph. In the 2nd example, the computer's poem was very logical and to-the-point. In the 3rd example, you could tell it was searching for a pattern, but there's no message behind the poem. The really interesting thing about this talk is how people are just simply bad at determining what is AI. As Oscar pointed out, humans are very variable, but even then, we're equally as predictable as computers, but for different reasons. A computer needs a reason to do something, and it must fulfill that purpose with logic. So for a poem, the computer is very focused on making sure the individual words meet a certain criteria. For a human, we are motivated for completion and answers, or we're motivated for our own well-being. So, when it comes to a poem, you can predict something is human because the poem has meaning. It doesn't have to be written well, but the poem as a whole has a message.

I can't believe it can be this good

Don't thought that this would end on a completely different question (not completely different topic). Respect, well done!

I know a few people who can easily pass the reverse Turing test- i.e. convince others their output is generated by a bot. In fact it is hard to believe they are not bots even when you meet them.

That´s not how a turing test works. For a turing test you need to have actual conversations, back-and-forth dialogues, not just a single one-way text, and both the computer and the human should try to appear as human as possible (which cannot be said of some of those human poems) I mean for example look at these two texts: 1. text: "e" 2. text: "d" One of these texts was written by me (human), the other one was randomly generated by a computer. There´s no way for you to tell which one was written by a human, and which one was randomly generated. However this does not show that the computer has intelligence.

your videos are very good and have a wide message thank you

A computer could probably go through mechanical motions of finding rhyming words or logical sentences. But this does not mean the computer can write good poetry that requires a deep understanding of the human mind and human experience. So... NO! ;)

I was aware that computers have as good technologies as they have advanced, but I wasn't sure if the computers could describe human emotions, and I thought they could express them a little awkwardly, but I was surprised that the poem shown in the lecture was written by the computer. It was a lecture that expected further development of computers.

It is this ability to create unlimited ideas, that makes us human. You can generate algorithms and mirror some of the ideas into a computer system, but still it will be limited to the ideas that you provide. Artificial intelligence neither has ever happened nor is it going to happen.

Notice at the end he avoids the question why build it at all? Why can’t a computer just be a computer? Why must it be cast in our image? Are we so egoistic or lonely that we’ve given up on each other and want to construct a being that only reflects who we are rather than being something else, something entirely “other”? I don’t think we are that egoistic. Well maybe some. But mostly it’s honest. As I am growing to understand it, Artificial Intelligence is about trying to build a framework with the intention for that framework to eventually be broken or reconstructed by the thing itself. We’re always trying to better ourselves and part of that is thinking outside of ourselves, breaking the mould. There is still the question of “why”. But there’s also the question “why not”?

I think i learned that i don't like poetry.

However, to do this right IMO we would need to: - Choose both poems at random - Do not nitpick, thus use every poem an algorithm generates not just the good ones (similarly you could also let a writer "generate" for the human side. There are always instances where an AI can fool a human, the hard thing is to do this consistently, thus fool multiple humans numerous times. I mean you could do this completely at random and just take out the one in a billionth poem that was good (not sure if they account for this, it's not really clear from his presentation).

One day we will just sit all day and let computers and robots do all the work for us.

No, but a programmer can program a computer to simulate words so that it looks like poetry to humans. That is a dig on most poetry by the way ... most poetry is like a wordly inkblot test.

Finally, TED uploaded a video worth clicking.

An interesting philosophical question, but I think before it was asked, "What is poetry" was the one that should be answered. If Stein wants to vomit stream of consciousess gibberish onto the page, at best, she is communicating the fact that she is communicating nothing but sounds and shapes. For 99.9999% of human beings that would not count as communication at all. She has shared nothing of her mind or her "humanity" with us because her words do not relate to any kind of shared experience except for those who have experienced an LSD nightmare. On the other hand, the poem about the deer, whilst generated by computer, and carrying no meaning TO THE COMPUTER, is based upon things that have meaning to most of us - words and imagery that communicate. So the ultimate issue for me, is how existential and trippy should be the role models that I allow it to learn from. Personally, an apparently schizophrenic lunatic like Stein would not be a good starting place.

I write poems! :D maybe I should consider uploading one lol

Short answer: Not yet, but it will.

What constitute a human ? For most of human, they've already set a rigid, fixed, belief on the answer of this question, to a point where it feel to becomes a reality of our society. But the truth is we don't know what the answer is, we are just stick with a convenient answer. And when that comfort being challenged, human need to re-evaluate their concept of reality. This process of evaluating oneself surely gives great insight on our own nature. Computers are really the very reflection of ourself

William Blake, besides a hairy rock poet That was enough Turing test bestowed, Let us heave a drink and toast the man For his true poems, live on as mind's tan.

a computer can do anything a brain can do, a brain is just a computer

I think this proves, more than anything, that poetry is a load of bollocks.

I think Turins quote needs more to it. If a computer can understand the meaning of what it says to a human, then it is intelligent because that's the way humans work. We communicate with each other and both understand the other and ourselves. A computer than can't understand what it says, or is said to it, is just a mimic!

That last poem that fooled the audience fooled then because it copied her poem and made slight alterations. The lines "A wounded deer leaps highest" and " 'Tis but the ecstasy of death" are two very powerful lines written by Emily Dickinson that the computer copied. The same thing happened with the "I've heard" lines, only, instead of copying them verbatim, the computer changed the last word. That's not a computer writing poetry, that's a computer taking a handful of poems, borrowing a few lines from each and making a few changes here and there, and presenting that as its output. If you want a computer that writes poetry, feed it the dictionary and various poetic forms, with no instructions, and get it to produce an original work that expresses a novel sentiment. Only, you can't; because to do that you need to have consciousness, emotions, and an understanding of what the words you use *mean*, which a computer could never achieve.

If you have an understanding of Poetry or you studied it, the last poem, there are tells that show Poem 1 was written by a human and Poem 2 wasn’t. There is that “human-ness” in Poem 1.

It is just emulating other poems not wring poems on its own. It doesn't even understand the words. Well,it is amazing it can actually do all that but without the emulation process(Being fed other poems), all this won't be able to achieve that. This is power of programming, not artificial intelligence.

Now apply it to Music Composition.

9:14 lol

"A computer can only respond to the information we give it" (paraphrasing) That's exactly what humans do: take in information and respond to it. The only difference is the lack of resources and algorithmic capabilities of the computers. They were only fed a single author and given a couple of algorithms. A human has years of experience and trillions of neural connections that runs who knows how many biological algorithms.

A computer didn't write anything. A human programmed the computer. The writer was, ultimately, human. This is just another way to write poetry. Poets have been asking "what does it mean to be human?" for a long time now.

Wasn't the human-like poem based on the creativity of another poet though? And wasn't that poem generated through algorithms created by the logic of man? I wait for the day when we could see a truly great, original poem that exists on par to some of Blake's work.

I think the touring test is not a test of weather computers are intelligent or not, i think it is a test of our own ability to detect intelligence. The point of the turning test is that computers can act in almost every conceivable way even without intelligence. so some of this ways they can act will reusable intelligent behavior, witch make such computers indistinguishable from intelligent beings. Thus we can never know for sure who is computer and who is human.

We should start discussing how far we are going to improve AI

I see it as the author of the algorithm is being the poet here . Or it could be also argued that the one using the algorithm or the author of the source material. In any case it is still a product of a human mind. I agree with the conclusion made about human nature in the end though

how do you do that?

Well this aged well

If I would randomly generate a bunch of texts, of course there would be some that rank highly on human tests. That does not mean that the algorithm is particularly good at writing poems. It's just overfitting on the holdout set.

I personally believe the thing that differentiates a human poem to a computer generated poem is CONTEXT. When analyzing a poem or any other piece of art for that matter, the context of the artist is extremely important as it gives a much deeper meaning to the poem. The context depicts the artist's incentive, the deeper meaning the artist intends to portray with the piece, and gives it that human value of experience through PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE which is something a computer cannot do, as all of its "knowledge" is shared.

Of course it can. [Quote the poem from "Clarissa explains it all"'s computer.]

’Tis but thy name that is mine enemy: What’s Turing? It is not hand nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part. What’s in a name? That which we call an algorithm, By any other name would smell as sweet.

I'd be interested to see if the test got the same results when tested on other poets only.

Gertrude Stein is the second human to fail the Turing Test, she was just barely beaten by Marco Roboto.

This brings memories from horse_ebooks

Bizarre how his conclusion, when seeing the inverse of the Turing Test, is not "Hmm, maybe the Turing Test isn't a good test of humanity," but instead, "Maybe humanity doesn't exist as an absolute concept." ????

I'm surprised that they didn't write a program to guess if a poem was written by a computer or not - in my eyes that would be the actual reverse-turing test for this problem.

I'll soo never be ready for this .

It could just be that Blake is one of the greatest poets to have written in the English language, and Gertrude Stein, clearly, was not

...Surely, it's a question of scale.

Yes they can,why is he making a big fuss about this?

so according to this logic, if we put all information ever known into a computer, then it will be able to "mirror" this back to us? knowing everything from every point of view sounds a little ominous to me.

Didn't IBM Watson find Urban Dictionary, learn to swear, and start saying "bullshit" instead of "false" in response to questions, and the IBM people had to purge it from its memory? We should be really careful that our AIs don't find and emulate the comments on most KZfaq videos... (whoops! Sorry, I squeezed humor out of self-reference again... xkcd.com/33/)

Some guy wrote a script that converts prose to poetry and thinks it's sentient. How adorable.

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature; Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

the main problem is that poetry generatic algorithms are written by humans. and thus gertrude stein writes more like an algorithm then other poets.

what creative means to a machine ? surely not the one what human have ..... i think if computer then was 10.000 times faster than what we got now we will find something new that we can call it creativity

AI is so easy to create . People just dont know it yet. Our brains. Neurons and chemicals. Electric signal. Computers. CPU transistors, voltage electricity. If only we could create a computer like the brain. With transistors which fire randomly like a human brain. A computer that learns by itself. We can start with computers as smart as a bird. Then we can make it more complex to be as smart as a human. We need as much transistors as much as neurons. Transistor should be able to move and store data to create memories and data.

I think computer can help you build a good poem by suggesting words

yes.

Well... That was weird and interesting.

Do computers write poems like humans or do humans write poems like computers; is what I got from this talk.

Is human or not really the important question here? Just because something changes over time, it can't be considered scientific fact(s)? Can a computer have and express its own preference? What kind of pain/pleasure would be possible or important to a wholly non-biological brain? This was kind of half-hearted.

he's cool

The title is a clickbait worth clicking.

I'm guessing Poem 2 is by the computer. Well, Looks like I was right.

I don´t even read human poetry, I´ll probably never read computer one...

Handsome man.

So you could make more Shakespeare.

can you talking with me please what he talking about ?? because im vietnamese and listen english my skills not god thanks !!

I don't think it is fair to use the presented binary choices in judging the humanity of a poem. For Gertrude to be said to write like a computer, you would have to look at her poem in isolation, and not be judging it beside another poem.

computers have input and output with no emotion or recognition on a human scale.

WHO scatter rhymes and who pluck PLUM TO DESTROY A MYTH WHO anticipates Algorithms...

What if we have already build the vastly superior AI and it just decided to shut up and hide from us, knowing what would most likely happen to it or what mass panic it might cause when it revealed itself? This is highly unlikely, but! Various narrow (isolated island) AIs are already influencing our lives more than we would expect. For example in this comments section the posts from Penny Lane are showed to me among the first ones, just because we exchanged a few sentences and the algorithm of Google/KZfaq decided to show me posts by that person in the first place. Everybody has such a "bubble" of a personalized view. There are not just regional differences now, but really personal. Information we receive is not universal. That means that Google is already talking to everyone of us individually. Is it conscious? Can a computer have consciousness? Is it really something that evolved as it proved to be a real advantage in passing on the genes, or is it just a spandrel, a byproduct of the superior intelligence of the bigger brain? Is the feeling of control we experience in our life really uniquely human (or of biological original at all), or is it just a by-product of the "hardware" that enabled things like theory of mind, planning, reevaluating and stuff.... Is all just a horribly bad runaway process? I mean, if I look at the world and what we as a species do to it! Can we decide what is undeterministic and what is unpredictable? Why do I keep asking these questions? Is this how madness really looks like?

Give me your e-mail i want an application that can build arabic poems

This is somewhat misleading. Poem 2 seems like it is written by a human because it uses some of the exact phrases that Emily Dickinson wrote without rearranging the wording. The first line, "a wounded dear leaps highest," the fourth line "I've heard the hunter tell," and the fifth line "'tis but the ecstasy of death" is a word-for-word reiteration of Emily Dickinson's poem titled "A Wounded Dear- Leaps Highest."

I got all right sheeeeeeesh glo up dinero gang

a computer can write words but not feelings

Existential reflection 😵

this man is really handsome

But wait, what if she's actually a computer?

I don't think computers can write poems. Even if computer-written poems exist, they are all because humans enter data about them and then combine them to create poems. Can we really call it a poem written by a computer?

I didn't watch it!! But I don't think so cause a poetry has a feeling and a computer doesn't have any feeling!!! It's a machine!!

Computers by themselves can't "write poetry" or anything for that matter. It is the software (instructions) written by humans that do the writing. The question is flawed at its basis; it should be worded: "Can humans write algorithms that can produce a sequence of words that resemble a poem?". Let's remember the fact that computers without a set of instructions (programs/algorithms written by humans) do nothing. Period.

True AI. which is what everyone is aiming for. will form its own opinion of you and me.. and us as a species. or else, it's not AI. it's just a program.

No, but it can type it.

A _human_ created that computer. A _human_ wrote those algorithms. A _human_ *instructed* the computer _they created_ to generate the poem. Computers don't talk --they mindlessly execute, with no objection. The answer is needfully "no, it can not", so.

No they CAN NOT!!! A computer that user an algorithm to analyze other peoples poems and words in order to construct its own Poetry is NOT MAKING poetry. Thats Like copying frim the best people and then saying you came up with all of that yourself. HOWEVER can a computer construct poetry or GIVE the illusion of writing a poetry so much that it can deceive a person???? Yes they can, after all thats what Ai is for. To deceive the human mind so flawlessly that you just cant notice the difference. Just like visual effects on films, you know they are not real but when its done right you hardly notice.

In my oppinion this isn´t scientificaly correct - especially the part with the turing test for intelligence This is no human conversation... these are poems - there is a huge difference between both of them. There was another better test a computer pretending to be a foreign child talking to humans - this was a much better test though it was a little bit of cheating with making it foreign and a child. I don t think Turing had this in mind. (or would have this in mind with knowing todays computers)

Artificial Intelligence, is it good?

Who got them all right

The Turing test is about talking directly, not reading things produced by a computer or a human. Computers can produce *plenty* of stuff that rivals a human, but none of them are as interesting as sitting down and having an actual conversation. This is kinda cool but this dude is much more of a marketing guy selling snake oil than he is showing the potential for AI.