Zach Evans, Dan Squire Jr, Arthur Wesley
Group Four: Computers
Central Question: Can computers write poetry?
Taroko Gorge by Nick Montfort
Taroko Gorge is a computer-generated poem created in 2009 by Nick Montfort, a poet and professor of digital media at MIT. It is a nature-themed poem named after a Taiwanese national park. It uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to scroll infinitely, ceaselessly producing new lines of poetry until the web page is either closed or refreshed. Montfort wrote the code that underpins the poem, defining what words get used in the poem, and how they should be structured to form grammatically correct sentences. Beyond that, the computer is largely left on its own to decide how these words are to be remixed to create poetic-sounding language. Due to the dynamic and infinite nature of the poem, I chose to annotate the first fourteen lines of a version of the poem that was generated the first time I opened the web page one day. My goal in these annotations was to answer our central question: Can computers write poetry? To this end, I focused my annotations on the organization of the words, as that is the element of the poem that the computer has the most control over. Does the organization of the words - the sentences they form, line breaks between them, etc. feel natural, like they were made by a human? Or do they instead feel stiff and robotic, like they were made by a computer? This is all explored in the subsequent annotations.
The
Comments
- Each line group forms a verse paragraph. According to the Poetry Foundation a verse paragraph is group of verse lines that make up a single rhetorical unit.
- Line break after every verse paragraph.
- Space after every stand-alone line. The space is only 2 characters wide so it's not enough to be a normal indent.
- Every stand-alone line is an imperative (command)
- Overall, I'd say that this is an example of computers writing poetry on par with a human, but just barely. Some lines feel very computer-like, as they contain the bare minimum necessary to form a grammatically correct sentence, such as "Stones rest." which only contains a one-word subject and predicate. However, other lines are more complex and feel like they could be written by a human, like "The crag trails the basin." So the poem ultimately does just enough to make you feel like this could be written by a human.
Red Faces by Gertrude Stein
"Red Faces" is a poem by Gertrude Stein. In the ted talk we saw, many people incorrectly identified this poem as being written by a robot. Many people make this incorrect assumption because Stein's style in this poem matches closely with what we expect a robot written poem to be. Such aspects include some poor grammar and incomplete sentences which we assume are relics of the robot's poor work but are actually deliberate choices of Stein.
Red flags the reason for pretty flags.
And ribbons.
Ribbons of flags
And wearing material
Reason for wearing material.
Give pleasure.
Can you give me the regions.
The regions and the land.
The regions and wheels.
All wheels are perfect.
Enthusiasm.
Comments
- "And ribbons" is an incomplete sentence. If it has been suggested to the reader that this poem may have been written by a robot, the reader might mistakenly take this grammatically incorrect sentence as a sign that it was written by a robot
- Stein intends to repeat the concept of the flags and uses "ribbons" as anaphora for flags. However, a reader who is looking for signs that a poem may have been written by a robot may miss this and simply regard the lines as a sentence that makes no logical sense. This is further exasperated by the fact that the sentence has no real rhyme scheme or structure. In our minds we assume that this lack of structure might come from a robot's inability to understand such structure.
- Another incomplete sentence, this continues to suggest to the reader that the hand of the author is not human.
- These last few lines are much closer to what we expect human poetry to sound like. They have real structure and clearly show us the message of the poem, people's enthusiasm about their own national flags. The trouble is that these lines occur at the end of the poem rather than the beginning. Humans rarely change their mind about anything once they formed their opinion on a subject. Therefore, since the reader has already formed the theory that the poem is written by a robot, they are unlikely to change their views in light of the more human-like style. If the lines of the poem had been reversed, it is likely that fewer people would mistake this poem as being written by a robot
The Elements by Alixandra Bamford
The Elements by Alixandra Bamford is a concrete poem that serves as the opposite of the previous unnamed poem made by the bot. This poem is recognizable as being written by a human due to it's very intentional form, with more focus on whitespace and spacing that is not possible to directly type. In contrast to the unnamed poem this poem uses it's whitespace to create a lightning structure as opposed to the words.
Comments
- past the beginning of the poem the reading order is fairly unclear, structure also focuses heavily on the whitespace
- While reading order seems to be mostly up to the reader, related chunks seem to be broken off into the columns below
- the italic word is also interesting beacause it's the only one in piece
- the text around seperation is a clear display of intention which may help display that this poem is human made as opposed to AI
untitled poem by a bot developed by Zackary Scholl
This untitled poem was written by a bot developed by Zackary Scholl, boasting an impressive rate of 80% of people believing the poem was written by a human. The main things to look at in this poem are the form and repeated phrases. The form focuses mostly on the words as opposed to the whitespace, with the words forming a lightning-like structure. I believe the reason most peope assume this poem is written by a human is because of it's use of form, however it may be seen through by the heavy repetiion.
you
are
inscribed
in the
lines on the
ceiling
you
are
inscribed in
the depths
of
the
storm
Comments
- Clear reading order, structure focuses on the words (not the whitespace)
- "depths of the storm" and "lines on the ceiling" follow the same wording format