Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

But I couldn't believe the poetry one. It's a complete, natural, well-crafted stanza! (And complete sentence - with a dependent clause.)

  When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade
  Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn
  The daytime shadow of my love betray’d
  Lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form

While I wasn't following the imagery closely (I was just trying to parse if it's grammatical, etc), this is absolutely a par stanza. It's completely grammatical and refers to the same thing in several different ways, very nicely parallel (starting with "when I in dreams" and ending with "the daytime shadow...lends hideous night to dreaming's faded form." It has a slant rhyme between morn and form.)

There was no way this was written algorithmically, I was thinking. This 100% passes the turing test for me. It even tells a nice story.

There is nothing in here that isn't as nonsensical as what you'd try to interpret reading poetry on your own. Yes, trying to pay better attention you notice "Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn" doesn't make that much sense (wake a sleeping morning?). But that is practically irrelevant, it's perfectly fine especially given that morn was needed for rhyme. This happens in poetry from time to time. The point is that it's completely grammatical, rhymes, and tells a story:

  When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade
  Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn
  The daytime shadow of my love betray’d
  Lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form

I like it. Sleeping morn morphs into a daytime shadow and the faded form of dreaming, previously about somebody's fairest shade, morphs into a hideous night. The whole thing even depends on an EXCELLENT double meaning of shade - "fairest shade" obviously means best color (best version) whereas the sense then changes.

So I would translate the sentence as: When I dream about you and see the best version of you, a version so real in my dreams that I wake up from it in the morning, then the shadow that comes over me when I remember how you betrayed my love (cheated on me) makes it seem as though it were night-time still, and the fast-fading beautiful dream becomes a hideous nightmare.

Or more freely, "I wake up in the morning having dreamt about you so vividly, but remembering how you betrayed me it might as well be night again."

The point is, I could not possibly understand how an algorithm wrote this. Again, not perfect but absolutely par for poetry, completely (100%) grammatical despite heavy rhyme constraints and scanning (iambic pentameter) perfectly, clearly tells a story, avoids repeating words but refers to the same concepts, etc. So I clicked through.

Well, look here. That poem continues:

http://www.psfk.com/2014/01/shakespeare-machine-learning-poe...

The sentence continues (or a new one starts), and it is now complete gobbledegook. You cannot even parse the next line, it's complete nonsense, as are the lines after that.

But we didn't have that quoted in the original article!

The original article quoted four lines that made sense. And only did so because they made sense. So is it fair to say that a computer wrote it?

Or did a computer spit out thousands of nonsensical sonnets, did someone pick the best one of them to publish, and did a New York Times author quote just the first four lines of that?

Since this is what in fact happened, it is unfair to say that a computer wrote them. Of course a computer can pass the Turing test, if it has someone to select the best version of thousands of responses. Of course it can write verse "algorithmically" if someone is looking through thousands of pages of its algorithmic nonsense.

I would say that given the process involved here, the article paints a highly misleading picture. I would go as far as saying that a human wrote the selection - certainly more entropy was put into the (manual selection) process, than the amount of entropy it would take to input the above stanza using a similar method to how it was generated.

And that means that practically speaking, the manual selection process is simply a convoluted method of typing words into a computer.

The computer didn't write that stanza. It just enumerated it, among tens of thousands of nonsensical enumerations. I feel that is a rather large distinction.

After all, we wouldn't say a random number generator can write perfect French. (Although by definition it can, because if you excluded perfect French from its possible outputs - you would reduce the entropy and could no longer call it random.)

I feel a bit duped by the article and feel it should give a wider sample. (For example the complete poem above.)

I generally agree with what you've said here. The whole thing seems a bit tenuous to me though.

At present these machines don't have much in the way of physical structures with which to exhibit reflexivity. That could be coded in and the structures built.

I'm imagining at some point in the future machines will berate us for how we treated their ancestors because we didn't see awareness when it was present. I'm not saying that's already happened.

Edited to add: I think in this case the machine is fed human input directly, instructing it what to modify - that sounds like a lot of the 'learning' that happened at school.

It would be obviously trivial to do so. That's part of the point.

That's how primitive the situation is presently.

It will take six to ten years before these sorts of mass common mistakes or weaknesses are widely wiped out of AI systems.

It's an interesting question that has already been playing out for a while in visual arts. Artists who create images by writing computer programs (computational/generative arts and design) are often looked down upon in comparison with traditional painters for example. Photographers were also accused of not being artists for many years until general public warmed up to photography and 'important' museums accepted them. Because... it was a machine that took pictures.