Structo Issue 17

written by a computer. There are some [poems] that are capable of fooling 66 percent of people into thinking they were written by a human when they were written by a computer. Of course this whole Bot or Not experiment is derived from Alan Turing’s test for computer intelligence, which says if you have a conversation and you can’t tell if [your conversational partner] is a human or a computer, then the computer can be said to be intelligent. structo: Are there traits which people mark as being particularly human-like or particularly Bot-like? schwartz: That’s where it starts to get complicated, because it’s hard to formalize aesthetics. That’s what so much of my project has been about: whether you can or can’t formalize aesthetics. To take a simple view: yes, there are certain traits in poems that will encourage people to select them as human. If they rhyme, if they have a theme that involves death and love or suffering. Generally, women score higher in humanness than men; and late nineteenth century women poets, in particular writing sentimentalist poetry, were strongly identified as being human. Computerness is easier to explain: it’s randomness. If there seems to be a lack of coherence in a poem, people are more likely to believe that it was written by a computer. structo: Where did the Bot poems come from? Do you code? schwartz: Not from my own code; I’m not a programmer, and certainly when I started this I had basically zero programming ability. They come from a variety of sources. I emailed a number of computer poets and asked them if they would give me unpublished work. There are also a lot of free generators online. I used these and took the [resulting] poems, crediting who made it, et cetera. I also came up with a few of my own little methods that didn’t involve writing code but what they produced was nonetheless what I would define as a computational poem. For instance, if you put a sentence into Google Translate and rotate it through 150 different languages and permutations, then it degrades. That passes under my definition 