Posted by Jaggederest on July 26, 2003 at 22:01:53:
: Of course, there's always the aspect of people accepting computer generated poetry.
What if they don't know it's computer generated?
:I doubt any critics, poets, or English scholars would accept something created by a computer as real poetry (though I'm sure Hallmark will love it).
How did The Bard put it? "Does not a rose by any other name smell as sweet?"
:While it may be accepted by the general public, so is the "angsty teen nonsense."
Some people watch the WWE too... A lot of them. See also: NASCAR.
: Do we really want to be turning the creation of something considered high art into a computer program?
It's still high art, it's just high art as mediated by a computer. If David hadn't programmed this, the computer wouldn't have spontaneously generated poetry. David would be the artist in this case. Or you could say that when I determine that one piece of poetry is better than the other, I'm the artist.
:There has to be something in that which is wrong. The only good I can see coming from such a thing is that it will push poets to write even better poetry, to keep up with and surpass the inevitably cliché riddled verse of the computers.
See, I think you're wrong, because computers don't ever really create. People do the creating. If a computer is serving up randomly generated bits of poetry, and people are voting on which ones are better and then the computer is redisplaying those bits more often... that's poetry created by people.
The computer can only reflect the values that we give it. It's the same thing as a synthesizer. I could set up a synthesizer for you and do the same thing. Is it any less music? Is electronica less "musical" than Bach?