Human Or Machine: Can You Tell Who Wrote These Poems?

Can a computer write a sonnet that’s indistinguishable from what a human can produce? That’s exactly what computer scientists at Dartmouth College tried to answer

Can you tell if a human wrote a touching poem or a machine trying to be a human? Computer scientists at Dartmouth College Made a competition to figure it out:  NPR’s Robert Siegel, host of All Things Considered, served as one of the judges of the competition. Each judge was asked to read 10 sonnets and decide whether they were written by man or machine. None of the judges was fooled by the poetic computers.

Now is your chance to try it yourself (answer in the end of the page)

SONNET #1

This is the same harsh angle of the sun,
this is the same so deadly humid heat
I felt that week your ending had begun,
reflecting from the glass along the street,
the shattered bits of accidents or trash,
the careless cost of greed obsessed with speed,
the same damned world that made your system crash
and sprout that cancer like a roadside weed.
I walked those mornings to the hospital,
eyes downcast, sweating, breathing in the fumes
of fast Columbus traffic, senses dull,
or so I thought, but now this heat exhumes
the body of that grief. I saw, I heard,
and I remember, Mother. Every word

 

SONNET #2

The dirty rusty wooden dresser drawer.
A couple million people wearing drawers,
Or looking through a lonely oven door,
Flowers covered under marble floors.

And lying sleeping on an open bed.
And I remember having started tripping,
Or any angel hanging overhead,
Without another cup of coffee dripping.

Surrounded by a pretty little sergeant,
Another morning at an early crawl.
And from the other side of my apartment,
An empty room behind the inner wall.

A thousand pictures on the kitchen floor,
Talked about a hundred years or more.


Answers:
SONNET #1 –  Human
SONNET #2- Machine

For more information visit All Things Considered

 

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