The reason my interest is in "what they find interesting" is because so much of poetry is surprise. We rarely praise a poem that uses the words we expect right

The reason my interest is in "what they find interesting" is because so much of poetry is surprise. We rarely praise a poem that uses the words we expect right where we expect them, and ended up right where we thought it would. (aside: check your twitter mentions, please?) It seems at least plausible to me that non-human agents could be Good For Poetry as long as we can clear a very specific hurdle. The hurdle is the fact that most people see art as something an artist--a human full of agency and intentionality--makes to communicate or share beauty. Obliquely, I think this definitional hurdle is a big part of why many struggle to find value in art produced from modernism on. I offered up this alternative definition of art (in the context of whether software can be art) in another thread a few weeks ago: Art is something--a sort of significance--we experience, and not really something we make. When we say we're "making art", we're making an object or giving a performance that we hope will induce others to have the experience of art. In reality, "making art" is an interpretative process; art, like love, is an experience--not an object. The point is that software most certainly induces people to have the art-experience, both intentionally and unintentionally. It's probably less common for source code to induce the art-experience (intentionally or not), but I suspect this too happens.