Do you need to be human to write poetry?

Borrowed from somewhere else, I thought all you Covers might have something to say about this:

"A team of researchers from Microsoft and Kyoto University developed a poet AI good enough to fool online judges, according to a paper published Thursday on the preprint site arXiv. It’s the latest step towards artificial intelligence that can create believable, human-passing language, and, man, it seems like a big one.

In order to generate something as esoteric as a poem, the AI was fed thousands of images paired with human-written descriptions and poems. This taught the algorithm associations between images and text. It also learned the patterns of imagery, rhymes, and other language that might make up a believable poem, as well as how certain colors or images relate to emotions and metaphors.

Once the AI was trained, it was then given an image and tasked with writing a poem that was not only relevant to the picture but also, you know, read like a poem instead of algorithmic nonsense.

And to be fair, some of the results were pretty nonsensical, even beyond the sorts of nonsense you’d find in a college literary magazine.

this realm of rain

grey sky and cloud

it’s quite and peaceful

safe allowed

And, arguably, worse:

I am a coal-truck

by a broken heart

I have no sound

the sound of my heart

I am not

or maybe this one:

the sun is shining

the wind moves

naked trees

you dance

And one more.

and now I am tired of my own

let me be the freshening blue

haunted through the sky bare and cold water

warm blue air shimmering

brightly never arrives

it seems to say

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-bad-poems

It does get a little better:

you

...are

.........inscribed

..............in the

...............lines on the

......ceiling

.......you

are

...inscribed in

..........the depths

..of

..........the

...storm

The idea is not new, but the technologies and mediums are. In 2010, Duke University undergrad Zackary Scholl modified a program that used a context-free grammar system to spit out full-length, auto-generated poems. He then submitted the output to online poetry websites, in order to gauge reader reaction (in his words, it was “overwhelmingly positive.”)

One of his poems was actually accepted by the Duke literary journal, The Archive. This is it:

A home transformed by the lightning

the balanced alcoves smother

this insatiable earth of a planet, Earth.

They attacked it with mechanical horns

because they love you, love, in fire and wind.

You say, what is the time waiting for in its spring?

I tell you it is waiting for your branch that flows,

because you are a sweet-smelling diamond architecture

that does not know why it grows.

https://medium.com/@Yisela/computer-generated-poetry-will-knock-your-socks-off-763c815a1b52

Clearly, a computer can write a poem that some editors, at least, cannot distinguish from human poems and are willing to publish. What does that say about the future of poetry and art in general? I think the more pertinent question might be: Regardless of perceived quality, is a poem written by a computer a real poem?"