3 ms·

Are only poets safe from robots?

21 points by kawera 11y ago

csense 11y ago
Seems like poetry is something that could be automated fairly easily. For example a limerick is: (1) u u S u u S u S (2) u u S u u S u S (3) u S u u S (4) u S u u S (5) S u u S u u S where u means unstressed syllable and S means stressed syllable. With the additional constraints that the last symbol in lines {1,2,5} and {3,4} form rhyming sets. Would be straightforward to build, once you have information about rules for stressed / unstressed syllables and rhyming. Use a grammar checker to make sure the result makes some kind of linguistic sense.
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm
thewarrior 11y ago
Yes I agree entirely. Poetry is one of the purest forms of human expression. By human expression I mean the combination of ideas and emotions. Even after the AI has acquired a language model and knowledge of rhyme and meter , and even perhaps a crude world model, A robot writing poetry would need to know what emotions something would typically evoke in order to write about it. For eg: to write a poem about a rotting pile of carcasses , or cockroaches it would require an innate understanding of how humans react to these things. What they might feel , the physical response and the visceral aspects of the reactions evoked. You could machine learn your way through thousands of poems and understand how lots of things feel but to produce true poetry the machine would have to completely imbibe our ideas of beauty and self. What objects are beautiful vs not beautiful , what sounds are harmonious vs dissonant and jarring , what kinds of faces are attractive vs ugly and so on and on and on... For example , what would it feel like to fly ? I'm not talking about the air rushing past , or looking down upon the world you whoosh past overhead. The one word that comes to my mind is a sense of exhilaration. Freedom. Perhaps a fear of heights.And I bet that's what came to your mind as well. But would our AI poet come to the same conclusion ? So this is not just AI Complete but an AI Insane problem. To appreciate and create poetry is to be human.
- bhickey 11y ago
  Why do you believe this? I have some familiarity with natural language processing and think that generating passable computer poetry is a fairly rudimentary task. Tell your model about meter, tell it about rhyme, learn word associations. Pick a language, give it every line of poetry you can find and hit go. What makes you think you could distinguish computational verse from something written by human hands? Try these examples. Which ones were written by people? a) A home transformed by the lightning the balanced alcoves smother this insatiable earth of a planet, Earth. b) For it matters not, how much we own; the cars ... the house ... the cash. What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash. c) It is really hard to break bad news without crying or falling apart.
  - bpicolo 11y ago
    (a) seems inherently robotic via the phrase "insatiable earth of a planet, Earth.". That said, there are certainly poems that could go both ways. But art is a weird environment: It's not necessarily a piece in and of itself that creates human interest in there. I'm sure there are a lot of `great poems` out there that nobody cares about because they weren't written by some great poet.
    - bhickey 11y ago
      (a) is indeed written by a machine, (b) is excerpted from a famously awful poem, and (c) is an unintentional haiku found in the New York Times. I agree with what you're saying about art, but it's far afield of the point thewarrior was making.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    > Why do you believe this? I have some familiarity with natural language processing and think that generating passable computer poetry is a fairly rudimentary task. Tell your model about meter, tell it about rhyme, learn word associations. Pick a language, give it every line of poetry you can find and hit go. What makes you think you could distinguish computational verse from something written by human hands? See, people always say that the trouble is getting your ML model to have some semantics to what it produces, to produce texts which somehow manage to genuinely correspond to the real world rather than just to the use of language. With poetry they might say, we don't just want something that fits the forms, but something with content, with soul. I say, yes, that's all true, and have you ever tried getting a randomly sampled human being to produce prose or poetry with meaningful content and soul? Untrained, we're possibly even worse than the neural nets!
pmoriarty 11y ago
"...give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..." [said Trurl the Constructor, to his friend Klapaucius]. Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said: "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit." "Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming: Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I’ll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Eclipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thy eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2ϕ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
ommunist 11y ago
pmoriarty just cited one. I have the other: “Mockles! Fent on silpen tree, Blockards three a-feening, Mockles, what silps came to thee In thy pantry dreaming? “Well, that’s an improvement!” shouted Trurl, not entirely convinced. “The last line particularly, did you notice?” Excerpt From: Lem, Stanislaw. “The Cyberiad.” Continuum Book, 1965.
zappo2938 11y ago
I wonder what T.S.Eliot would say about a robot winning a prize named after him? "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."[1] -- T.S. Eliot from 'Tradition and the Infividual Talent' In this essay, Eliot uses the metaphor of chemistry to describe the poetic process. However, I think using the metaphor of the chemical process inside the ribosome is a better analogy. The poet's mind takes a finite amount of emotions and feelings as there are a finite amount of condons which can be processed through a ribosome in an infinite number of ways to create all sorts of proteins [2] as the poet can move the reader to experience new feelings. Whereas a computer can test if a new protein will bind to a cell or act in a certain way, the computer doesn't have the ability to quantify if a reader is experiencing a new feeling or epiphany. Or perhaps, a person can be placed in a MRI machine so the computer can have a feed back loop. A good example of the artistic process that T.S.Eliot described is how George Lucas, who has said in interviews that T.S.Eliot has influenced his work, stitched together several scenes from dog fights in WWII movies [3] using physical images of things that are familiar to the audience like planes and words, "I got him," to create a new feeling for people to experience. Lucas and Eliot also had the same goal of using art to affect people into a spiritual experience. Edit: I don't know how to English. [1] http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/tradition.htm http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/traditi... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfYf_rPWUdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfYf_rPWUdY [3] http://i.imgur.com/1MjQ4My.gifv http://i.imgur.com/1MjQ4My.gifv
singularity2001 11y ago
KING LEAR: O, if you were a feeble sight, the courtesy of your law, Your sight and several breath, will wear the gods With his heads, and my hands are wonder'd at the deeds, So drop upon your lordship's head, and your opinion Shall be against your honour. https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ There goes Shakespeare
cryoshon 11y ago
Not sure how poets can be considered "safe" from robots when they're already priced out of being poets for a living by the cost of merely living. Poets weren't safe from white collar work, nevermind robots. There is absolutely no economic demand for poets, so there is no incentive for robots to do their job cheaper or more efficiently.
rkabir 11y ago
https://github.com/rkabir/metapoet https://github.com/rkabir/metapoet

21 points by kawera 11y ago

Seems like poetry is something that could be automated fairly easily. For example a limerick is: (1) u u S u u S u S (2) u u S u u S u S (3) u S u u S (4) u S u u S (5) S u u S u u S where u means unstressed syllable and S means stressed syllable. With the additional constraints that the last symbol in lines {1,2,5} and {3,4} form rhyming sets. Would be straightforward to build, once you have information about rules for stressed / unstressed syllables and rhyming. Use a grammar checker to make sure the result makes some kind of linguistic sense.

patrickaljord 11y ago
http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm

thewarrior 11y ago

Yes I agree entirely. Poetry is one of the purest forms of human expression. By human expression I mean the combination of ideas and emotions. Even after the AI has acquired a language model and knowledge of rhyme and meter , and even perhaps a crude world model, A robot writing poetry would need to know what emotions something would typically evoke in order to write about it. For eg: to write a poem about a rotting pile of carcasses , or cockroaches it would require an innate understanding of how humans react to these things. What they might feel , the physical response and the visceral aspects of the reactions evoked. You could machine learn your way through thousands of poems and understand how lots of things feel but to produce true poetry the machine would have to completely imbibe our ideas of beauty and self. What objects are beautiful vs not beautiful , what sounds are harmonious vs dissonant and jarring , what kinds of faces are attractive vs ugly and so on and on and on... For example , what would it feel like to fly ? I'm not talking about the air rushing past , or looking down upon the world you whoosh past overhead. The one word that comes to my mind is a sense of exhilaration. Freedom. Perhaps a fear of heights.And I bet that's what came to your mind as well. But would our AI poet come to the same conclusion ? So this is not just AI Complete but an AI Insane problem. To appreciate and create poetry is to be human.

bhickey 11y ago
Why do you believe this? I have some familiarity with natural language processing and think that generating passable computer poetry is a fairly rudimentary task. Tell your model about meter, tell it about rhyme, learn word associations. Pick a language, give it every line of poetry you can find and hit go. What makes you think you could distinguish computational verse from something written by human hands? Try these examples. Which ones were written by people? a) A home transformed by the lightning the balanced alcoves smother this insatiable earth of a planet, Earth. b) For it matters not, how much we own; the cars ... the house ... the cash. What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash. c) It is really hard to break bad news without crying or falling apart.
- bpicolo 11y ago
  (a) seems inherently robotic via the phrase "insatiable earth of a planet, Earth.". That said, there are certainly poems that could go both ways. But art is a weird environment: It's not necessarily a piece in and of itself that creates human interest in there. I'm sure there are a lot of `great poems` out there that nobody cares about because they weren't written by some great poet.
  - bhickey 11y ago
    (a) is indeed written by a machine, (b) is excerpted from a famously awful poem, and (c) is an unintentional haiku found in the New York Times. I agree with what you're saying about art, but it's far afield of the point thewarrior was making.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  > Why do you believe this? I have some familiarity with natural language processing and think that generating passable computer poetry is a fairly rudimentary task. Tell your model about meter, tell it about rhyme, learn word associations. Pick a language, give it every line of poetry you can find and hit go. What makes you think you could distinguish computational verse from something written by human hands? See, people always say that the trouble is getting your ML model to have some semantics to what it produces, to produce texts which somehow manage to genuinely correspond to the real world rather than just to the use of language. With poetry they might say, we don't just want something that fits the forms, but something with content, with soul. I say, yes, that's all true, and have you ever tried getting a randomly sampled human being to produce prose or poetry with meaningful content and soul? Untrained, we're possibly even worse than the neural nets!

pmoriarty 11y ago

"...give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..." [said Trurl the Constructor, to his friend Klapaucius]. Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said: "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit." "Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming: Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I’ll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Eclipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thy eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2ϕ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad

ommunist 11y ago

pmoriarty just cited one. I have the other: “Mockles! Fent on silpen tree, Blockards three a-feening, Mockles, what silps came to thee In thy pantry dreaming? “Well, that’s an improvement!” shouted Trurl, not entirely convinced. “The last line particularly, did you notice?” Excerpt From: Lem, Stanislaw. “The Cyberiad.” Continuum Book, 1965.

zappo2938 11y ago

I wonder what T.S.Eliot would say about a robot winning a prize named after him? "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."[1] -- T.S. Eliot from 'Tradition and the Infividual Talent' In this essay, Eliot uses the metaphor of chemistry to describe the poetic process. However, I think using the metaphor of the chemical process inside the ribosome is a better analogy. The poet's mind takes a finite amount of emotions and feelings as there are a finite amount of condons which can be processed through a ribosome in an infinite number of ways to create all sorts of proteins [2] as the poet can move the reader to experience new feelings. Whereas a computer can test if a new protein will bind to a cell or act in a certain way, the computer doesn't have the ability to quantify if a reader is experiencing a new feeling or epiphany. Or perhaps, a person can be placed in a MRI machine so the computer can have a feed back loop. A good example of the artistic process that T.S.Eliot described is how George Lucas, who has said in interviews that T.S.Eliot has influenced his work, stitched together several scenes from dog fights in WWII movies [3] using physical images of things that are familiar to the audience like planes and words, "I got him," to create a new feeling for people to experience. Lucas and Eliot also had the same goal of using art to affect people into a spiritual experience. Edit: I don't know how to English. [1] http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/tradition.htm http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/traditi... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfYf_rPWUdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfYf_rPWUdY [3] http://i.imgur.com/1MjQ4My.gifv http://i.imgur.com/1MjQ4My.gifv

singularity2001 11y ago

KING LEAR: O, if you were a feeble sight, the courtesy of your law, Your sight and several breath, will wear the gods With his heads, and my hands are wonder'd at the deeds, So drop upon your lordship's head, and your opinion Shall be against your honour. https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ There goes Shakespeare

cryoshon 11y ago

Not sure how poets can be considered "safe" from robots when they're already priced out of being poets for a living by the cost of merely living. Poets weren't safe from white collar work, nevermind robots. There is absolutely no economic demand for poets, so there is no incentive for robots to do their job cheaper or more efficiently.

rkabir 11y ago

https://github.com/rkabir/metapoet https://github.com/rkabir/metapoet