Truly, AI is a long way from beating the Emperor's New Clothes game.
But frankly, there are easier, more useful AI goals to target.
Of course, I did incorrectly guess that one of the poems was written by a machine, when it was a human.
Honest question -- did you get the same emotional read off of the machine-poems as you did the human-poems? If not, perhaps there is something more involved in poetry than stringing words together!
Yep -- none.
Take Sonnet #6 for example. You can tell there is intelligence behind the sentences being written. Each line builds on the line before it. Compare to sonnet #5 which rambles on about nothing and uses duplicate words (then comes a small bright spark comes)...
Sonnet 1 was about a person mourning their mother who died in a car accident. It read well and made sense, so I would have been very surprised if it were written by a machine.
Sonnet 2 didn't make sense, but more than that there were very awkward constructs. Rhyming "drawer" (the furniture) with "door" and "drawers" (the undergarments) with "floors" in the same quatrain reads very poorly. "Sergeant" does not rhyme with "apartment".
Sonnet 3 was about something (a growing plant), and it reads well, so it was written by a human.
Sonnet 4 was about something (Joy, a personification of the emotion), and it read well. "Joy" being consistently capitalized throughout was a subtlety that convinced me it was written by a human.
Sonnet 5 had more awkward constructs. "Shame" and "Tame", "Inflame" and "Came" in the same stanza. "Bring" and "wandering" don't really rhyme. The last stanza is just weird -- "hear" is supposed to rhyme with "cheer", "cheers" (which is the line right before "cheer"...) is supposed to rhyme with "roars" (?), and "nights" is supposed to rhyme with "respects"? Again, it didn't really make any sense.
Sonnet 6 was similar to Sonnet 3. It's about something (a growing plant again), and it reads well again.
Generally, there's a poem (more than one even) to fit any person's taste. patio11 has quoted one before, which is meaningful to him:
I went to find the pot of gold
that's waiting where the rainbow ends
I searched and searched and searched and searched
and searched and searched, and then
there it was, deep in the grass
under an old and twisty bough
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine at last
What do I search for now?
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation
for fear they should succumb and go astray
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested
you will find it better policy to say:
We never pay anyone Dane-geld, no matter how trifling the cost
For the end of that game is oppression and shame
and the nation that plays it is lost!
All along that singing river, that black mass of men was seen
High above their shining weapons flew their own beloved green
Death to every foe and traitor, whistle out the marching tune
And our army buys her freedom at the rising of the moon
The problem comes in with an upper-class movement to distinguish themselves from the rubes who appreciate good poetry by removing all the things that make it good. The problem SilasX identifies is real, and you can earn a lot of acclaim today writing awful, rhythmless, rhymeless, themeless stuff and calling it poetry. Compounding the problem, this terrible high-prestige form is what you'll learn about if you decide to take a poetry class. But we shouldn't let it ruin our view of what poetry can be.
While there are classes in post-modern poetry, most poetry classes are not that.
How many poetry classes have you taken?
I did a degree in English lit. The poetry classes I took looked something like this:
- Old and Middle English Poetry (Beowulf, Chaucer, etc.)
- Elizabethan Poetry
- Paradise Lost
- The Shakespearean Sonnet
- 18th Century Classicism (Alexander Pope, etc.)
- Victorian Poetry (Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, etc.)
- 20th Century Irish Poetry (Yeats, that kind of thing)
- 20th Century American Modernism
Only in the last class was there was anything like you described, and even then it only made up a fraction of the material covered.
Here is one of the most critically acclaimed poems of the last 40 years. It's perfectly easy to understand. http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/a-martian-sends-a-post...
Did you recognise, for instance, that the first poem is the poet's recollection of cancer ravaging her mother, and of how she walked to the hospital every day to see her?
Did you understand and just not care, or did you not understand and so find nothing to care about?