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Why do you believe this? I have some familiarity with natural language processing and think that generating passable computer poetry is a fairly rudimentary tas

by 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!

by bhickey 11y ago

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!