CuratedAI: A literary magazine written by machines, for people | Hacker News Reader

CuratedAI: A literary magazine written by machines, for people

curatedai.com

This is beautiful:

  The deeper the hustle the deeper the pain
  I wish I could play the Violin
  The thought of you is driving me insane

Go to http://villanellebot.tumblr.com/post/148629267135/so-many-th... for the entire poem, and https://avoision.com/2015/08/26/villanelle-bot-poems-in-the-... to learn how it was done.

That actually is incredibly beautiful. It's crazy to think that the machine that generated it was devoid of the emotions behind this assembly of words.

Well is it? At some point, either we become like machines, or the machines become like us. There is a limit to how many times we can redraw the lines.

The common distinction between machine and life seems arbitrary. Suppose for instance you had essentially infinite resources to design a machine that self-replicates by stealing blood from mammals, etc etc. You would end up with something very much like the mosquito. Why is it a machine only when man designs it?

This is perhaps more apparent with viruses. They aren't living per se, but are halfway there. The assertion that the virus is not a machine seems to be a difference without a distinction.

The expression is "a distinction without a difference"

Oh yes! Thanks.

Generating in the loosest sense.

Code up the format of a villanelle and find Twitter posts to fit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villanelle

> VillanelleBot, created by Felix Jung, is a bot that composes villanelles using random posts from Twitter. Each line corresponds to a full post on Twitter

If you click on the line it goes through to the tweet e.g.

> i ate curly fries and shaker fries

https://twitter.com/ahtaebvh/status/757935083135258626

Followers of computer generated literature may recall "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed" [1], ostensibly written by the program Racter [2] (though that authorship was never conclusively proven).

[1] http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter

Racter was quite impressive for its time.

When you just set an AI to generate content based on input text, you get garbage like this. You need to set restraints and create a form to work in. An "AI" (i.e. probably a markov chain) spewing out word salad just isn't interesting in 2016 unless it has conceptual weight.

Fairly awful stuff but it would be fascinating to keep that experiment running for a decade to watch AI evolve.

Ugly and nonsense. But over time I expect it evolving into something we could read.

I Ate Curly Fries And Shaker Fries has been stuck in my head all morning... and I am still waiting for the rain to abate.

Very poetic

The best part of my job is the weight I lost. Found the truth beneath your lies. And I am still waiting for the rain to abate.

The code behind this is probably more poetic than the output. Perhaps the union of technology and culture is farther than we think.

Although, this really shines a light on the fact that it probably isn't necessary for technology to attempt to optimize every human experience.

SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator - Note: one of the papers was accepted to SCI 2005

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

This reminds me of that AI-written screenplay earlier this year [1]... it's interesting, it may be progress, but it's partly carried by its presentation and production value and the promo value of "who" it was authored by. (This is also true, to a lesser degree, of human works.) Fingers crossed for progress.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-th...

Reading the prose is like reading James Joyce, without the twee construction.

The poems I actually enjoyed, if only because they were funny to read out loud.

I really don't see the literary merit in a lot of these pieces, but obviously this is an interesting step forward...

"I Ate Curly Fries And Shaker Fries" wouldn't be out of place in well-regarded literary magazines. That slice-of-life with references-only-the-author-gets but maybe-sometimes-they-resonate-in-an-oblique-way-with-the-reader poetry is pretty common. Get an author with a decent bio[1] to submit it and I bet you could get a similar-quality machine-generated work published in Ploughshares or similar.

[1] MFA, edits a local poetry magazine with a circulation of 100, accepted submissions to some mid-level publications, one or two "chapbooks" out.

Try submitting it. It will get rejected immediately becasue a) villanelle's are hokey and played out and b) it's obvious this was written by a machine. There's no poetic turn, there's nothing worthwhile to derive from it. It's word salad. There's a reason why Oulipo, whose members have written many algorithmic poems plays and novels, despised chance generations of text.

If the aim is to land somewhere within the style of Edward Lear, then this is a job well done.

Love the caption. Straight out of the future!

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