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I have a question:
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Can a computer write poetry?
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This is a provocative question.
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You think about it for a minute,
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and you suddenly have a bunch
of other questions like:
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What is a computer?
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What is poetry?
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What is creativity?
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But these are questions
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that people spend their entire
lifetime trying to answer,
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not in a single TED Talk.
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So we're going to have to try
a different approach.
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So up here, we have two poems.
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One of them is written by a human,
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and the other one's written by a computer.
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I'm going to ask you to tell me
which one's which.
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Have a go:
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Poem 1: Little Fly / Thy summer's play, /
My thoughtless hand / Has brush'd away.
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A I not / A fly like thee? /
Or art not thou / A man like me?
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Poem 2: We can feel / Activist
through your life's / morning /
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Pauses to see, pope I hate the / Non
all the night to start a great otherwise
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Alright, time's up.
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Hands up if you think Poem 1
was written by a human.
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OK, most of you.
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Hands up if you think Poem 2
was written by a human.
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Very brave of you,
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because the first one was written
by the human poet William Blake.
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The second one was written by an algorithm
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that took all the language
from my Facebook feed on one day
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and then regenerated it algorithmically,
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according to methods that I'll describe
a little bit later on.
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So let's try another test.
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Again, you haven't got ages to read this,
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so just trust your gut.
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Poem 1: A lion roars and a dog barks.
It is interesting / and fascinating
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that a bird will fly and not / roar
or bark. Enthralling stories about animals
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are in my dreams and I will sing them all
if I / am not exhausted or weary.
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Poem 2: Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate
sodas! / You are really beautiful!
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Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!
All / the stuff they've always talked about
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Alright, time's up.
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So if you think the first poem
was written by a human,
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put your hand up.
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OK.
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And if you think the second poem
was written by a human,
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put your hand up.
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We have, more or less, a 50/50 split here.
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It was much harder.
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The answer is,
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the first poem was generated
by an algorithm called Racter,
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that was created back in the 1970s,
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and the second poem was written
by a guy called Frank O'Hara,
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who happens to be one
of my favorite human poets.
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(Laughter)
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So what we've just done now
is a Turing test for poetry.
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The Turing test was first proposed
by this guy, Alan Turing, in 1950,
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in order to answer the question,
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can computers think?
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Alan Turing believed that if
a computer was able
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to have a to have a text-based
conversation with a human,
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with such proficiency
such that the human couldn't tell
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whether they are talking
to a computer or a human,
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then the computer can be said
to have intelligence.
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So in 2013, my friend
Benjamin Laird and I,
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we created a Turing test
for poetry online.
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It's called bot or not,
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and you can go and play it for yourselves.
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But basically, it's the game
we just played.
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You're presented with a poem,
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you don't know whether it was written
by a human or a computer
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and you have to guess.
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So thousands and thousands
of people have taken this test online,
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so we have results.
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And what are the results?
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Well, Turing said that if a computer
could fool a human
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30 percent of the time
that it was a human,
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then it passes the Turing test
for intelligence.
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We have poems on the bot or not database
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that have fooled 65 percent
of human readers into thinking
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it was written by a human.
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So, I think we have an answer
to our question.
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According to the logic of the Turing test,
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can a computer write poetry?
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Well, yes, absolutely it can.
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But if you're feeling
a little bit uncomfortable
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with this answer, that's OK.
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If you're having a bunch
of gut reactions to it,
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that's also okay because
this isn't the end of the story.
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Let's play our third and final test.
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Again, you're going to have to read
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and tell me which you think is human.
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Poem 1: Reg flags the reason
for pretty flags. / And ribbons.
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And wearing material / Reasons
for wearing material. / Give pleasure.
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Poem 2: A wounded deer leaps
highest, / I've heard the daffodil
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I've heard the flag to-day /
I've heard the hunter tell; /
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'Tis but the ecstasy of death, /
And then the brake is almost done ...
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OK, time is up.
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So hands up if you think Poem 1
was written by a human.
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Hands up if you think Poem 2
was written by a human.
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Whoa, that's a lot more people.
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So you'd be surprised to find that Poem 1
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was written by the very
human poet Gertrude Stein.
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And Poem 2 was generated
by an algorithm called RKCP.
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Now before we go on, let me describe
very quickly and simply,
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how RKCP works.
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So RKCP is an algorithm
designed by Ray Kurzweil,
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who's a director of engineering at Google
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and a firm believer
in artificial intelligence.
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So, you give RKCP a source text,
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it analyzes the source text in order
to find out how it uses language,
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and then it regenerates language
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that emulates that first text.
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So in the poem we just saw before,
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Poem 2, the one that you all
thought was human,
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it was fed a bunch of poems
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by a poet called Emily Dickinson
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and looked at the way she used language,
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learned the model,
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and then it regenerated a model
according to that same structure.
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But the important thing to know about RKCP
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is that it doesn't know the meaning
of the words it's using.
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The language is just raw material,
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it could be Chinese,
it could be in Swedish,
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it could be the collected language
from your Facebook feed for one day.
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It's just raw material.
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And nevertheless, it's able
to create a poem
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that seems more human
than Gertrude Stein's poem,
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and Gertrude Stein is a human.
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So what we've done here is,
more or less, a reverse Turing test.
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So Gertrude Stein, who's a human,
is able to write a poem
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that fools a majority
of human judges into thinking
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that it was written by a computer.
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Therefore, according to the logic
of the reverse Turing test,
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Gertrude Stein is a computer.
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(Laughter)
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Feeling confused?
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I think that's fair enough.
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So far we've had humans
that write like humans,
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we have computers that write
like computers,
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we have computers that write like humans,
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but we also have,
perhaps most confusingly,
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humans that write like computers.
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So what do we take from all of this?
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Do we take that William Blake
is somehow more of a human
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than Gertrude Stein?
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Or that Gertrude Stein is more
of a computer than William Blake?
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(Laughter)
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These are questions
I've been asking myself
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for around two years now,
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and I don't have any answers.
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But what I do have are a bunch of insights
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about our relationship with technology.
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So my first insight is that,
for some reason,
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we associate poetry with being human.
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So that when we ask,
"Can a computer write poetry?"
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we're also asking,
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"What does it mean to be human
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and how do we put boundaries
around this category?
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How do we say who or what
can be part of this category?"
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This is an essentially
philosophical question, I believe,
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and it can't be answered
with a yes or no test,
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like the Turing test.
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I also believe that Alan Turing
understood this,
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and that when he devised
his test back in 1950,
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he was doing it
as a philosophical provocation.
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So my second insight is that,
when we take the Turing test for poetry,
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we're not really testing
the capacity of the computers
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because poetry-generating algorithms,
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they're pretty simple and have existed,
more or less, since the 1950s.
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What we are doing with the Turing
test for poetry, rather,
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is collecting opinions about what
constitutes humanness.
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So, what I've figured out,
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we've seen this when earlier today,
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we say that William Blake
is more of a human
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than Gertrude Stein.
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Of course, this doesn't mean
that William Blake
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was actually more human
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or that Gertrude Stein
was more of a computer.
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It simply means that the category
of the human is unstable.
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This has led me to understand
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that the human is not a cold, hard fact.
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Rather, it is something
that's constructed with our opinions
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and something that changes over time.
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So my final insight is that
the computer, more or less,
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works like a mirror
that reflects any idea of a human
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that we show it.
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We show it Emily Dickinson,
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it gives Emily Dickinson back to us.
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We show it William Blake,
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that's what it reflects back to us.
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We show it Gertrude Stein,
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what we get back is Gertrude Stein.
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More than any other bit of technology,
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the computer is a mirror that reflects
any idea of the human we teach it.
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So I'm sure a lot of you have been hearing
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a lot about artificial
intelligence recently.
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And much of the conversation is,
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Can we build it?
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Can we build an intelligent computer?
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Can we build a creative computer?
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What we seem to be asking over and over
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is can we build a human-like computer?
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But what we've seen just now
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is that the human
is not a scientific fact,
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that it's an ever-shifting,
concatenating idea
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and one that changes over time.
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So that when we begin
to grapple with the ideas
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of artificial intelligence in the future,
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we shouldn't only be asking ourselves,
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"Can we build it?"
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But we should also be asking ourselves,
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"What idea of the human
do we want to have reflected back to us?"
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This is an essentially philosophical idea,
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and it's one that can't be answered
with software alone,
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but I think requires a moment
of species-wide, existential reflection.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
Maricene Crus
Just a question:
shouldn't the subtitles for the poems be written between square brackets since they are shown in slides and not spoken?
Thank you!
Retired user
A typo at 04:13 It should read "Red" instead of "Reg"