Quote:
Originally Posted by R. Nemo Hill
scandalous! What will become of literature?!
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Ha! Exactly, Nemo.
So in 1950, seriously, 1950, Vonnegut wrote a story called Epicac. You can read all about it
here. In the early 70's, people were using LISP to generate text strings. There's nothing new about any of this, the arguments all happened years ago, there's no point in getting worked up about it now.
It was relatively easy to write a program for playing chess. The game seems complicated, but it's mathematically reducible. Now even a dumb program, one you can run on your PC, can outplay the best human in the world.
In the 90's, people were using Linux to make self-learning bots who could teach themselves to play checkers. They got better and better as they played. They could run a thousand games a day. Does anyone really think they won't catch up? Yes, language is far more complex than chess. But Moore's law still holds.
There's an amusing joke here. We were always taught that a good metaphor takes two disparate concepts and links them, finds their previously unimagined connections. It was the very measure of a great poet. That one goes all the way back to Aristotle. And that was exactly the same technique the bots used to overcome the spam filters. Over a decade ago.
Somewhere out there some english major who knows how to code is staring at a screen right now. Her idea of poetry doesn't begin and end with Jabberwocky, a coder favorite. And she doesn't care about the silly pop culture stuff this Bok guy is writing about. She's hard coding for hard lit. And when we see what she's doing, she's going to blow us away with what she can achieve...
Best,
Bill