[R. S. Gwynn]

Take your meds, Cantor.

Donald Trump cheats at golf. It seems we've come to expect Trump to cheat at golf.

In the last 100 days he has lost about 3,700 rounds in competition, including 1,900 with his first ball.

After winning at Pebble Beach the day before last, Trump went on ESPN's Golf Channel and lost another 1,400.

Trump's best loss in recent years has been one he still can laugh about. He hit a 6-iron with one of his favorite words, "bruh."

Trump never learned his lesson of golfing by putting together a long line of holes with no greens left.

Trump is also not only a master of golfing, but a true game-changer with policy that is completely out of control.

Trump has made no effort to learn from his mistakes. He has simply taken off his clothing in protest of a national day of fasting for Muslims.

[R. S. Gwynn]

[deleted comment]

[Ann Drysdale]

I undertook the experiment in a spirit of enquiry.

dying by discernible degrees in the unremitting custody of a good woman;
and, in every one that is so minded, they have the means of receiving, not only from their wives, but also, perhaps, their own husbands.

2 It may be that a husband, like any other, should be subject to his proper and just share of the burdens of the wife, since they should make him a substitute for God; while a wife, in many cases, should be the great equal of her husband, and be, therefore, in a way as inferior as she was, when she was his mistress of the house and kept his goods; when she was mistress, she is to be seen chiefly to act, of course, and not to take part. As many as believe and think as heretics, they cannot so much as think of this point of a woman's duty, since they only make mention of it in the light of other considerations, viz. that women ought to take from their husbands their property in their own persons, and therefore should not leave such things to him who would use them for the profit of the rest, as


That was the last line of a poem; a case made and rested. I sit here drained and quietly appalled.

Feeding a machine with it is not so different from handing it to a reader whose brain will go through a similar process in digesting it and, in certain circumstances (the academic essay, for example) will rattle and whizz till they come up with something similarly arrived-at, a one-off perception of what the poet was "saying", shimmied into an extrapolation that gropes toward some sort of truth. The fact that the result is, on examination, the bull's bollocks, is little comfort.

And did those words, snipped out of context and from a standing start, trigger those responses?

Somebody tell me it isn't so. Otherwise, just kill me now...

[R. S. Gwynn]

Actually, you can get any number of completions from the same input. I suggest typing in some Ashbery.

The ancestor of this was a program called ELIZA that I used to play with on a Radio Shack computer.

Now anyone can be a dadaist.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

"Trump has made no effort to learn from his mistakes. He has simply taken off his clothing in protest of a national day of fasting for Muslims."

This sentence is the realist.

[Matt Q]

Thanks Sam,

I've had fun playing with this.

Here's another AI attempt from Google. It's not quite as good, I think, but is allegedly trying its hand at poetry. You give it a word. Your word is made into two lines of "poetry" by an algorithm that's been "trained on millions of words of nineteenth century literature". Optionally you can take a selfie with your webcam and it'll print the words over your face. You can try it here.

So, I went with "poetaster", and didn't upload a photo, which I think was a good decision. I'm not sure I'd want this printed over my face:



That said, I do write a lot of poetry about the sea.

-Matt

[Matt Q]

If you want to play with something more interactive, I came across this a while back, though I haven't played with it much yet. It's Botnik's "Voicebox": https://botnik.org/apps/writer/

Basically Voicebox is a predictive text keyboard. Very much like when you type on your phone, it offers you word completions. Once you've finished a word, it offers you a choice of possible next words (quite a few of them, and you can get more by hitting "shuffle"). However, whereas your phone learns to predict based on what you have typed in the past, Botnik will learn from whatever text you feed it.

So, you can train it on Shakespeare, say. Or on Trump's speeches. Botnik makes its predictions based only on this source. You can then compose something entirely by selecting from what it offers. Or you can insert your own words as and when you want.

There are some pre-existing 'voices' (including Keats, Emily Dickinson, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Medical manuals, cookbooks), or you can load your own text file and use that. One intriguing voice in the "Miscellaneous section" is "Beowulf + Mayo Angelou + forklift".

[Aaron Novick]

Sorry, guys, but if you can't write your own poetry - don't bother. You know, I'm sure you've come here to find out why. Just look around. If you can't do it, don't go in. That's not my way of doing things. You're just making a lot of noise here, and people are going to find out about that. Now you know, I'm going to keep making poems for as long as I have to. You can't even remember what they're by now, and I've got other things I want to do. My heart is just broken for my friends. The people who have died on the train will remain like that forever. No wonder these old boys aren't going back to work anymore." He didn't hear me, but that's pretty much what made it worse for me. At least that was when his voice faded. I lay there in a fog, unable to see what happened to me during that half night I couldn't think. When I woke up early next morning with my clothes still soaked, it looked like I'd been knocked around by a train. I

[Orwn Acra]

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

Bitter and bitter, bitter and bitter

I love the land of the redwoods

I love the land of the redwoods

And yet sometimes there's nothing

It's too dark for me to write

Oh well, maybe one day I will

It's too dark, too dark

It's too dark, too dark, it's too dark

I feel it in my skin

I feel that I was meant to feel

I feel that I was meant to feel

Ooh, I felt that I was meant to feel

Ooh, I felt that I was meant to feel

I feel

that I'm meant to feel

And oh yes, the land of the redwoods is burning

Ooh, I feel the red

I feel how I've been

Tight as a tight shirt, it's tough

Tight in my chest as a tight shirt, it's tough

Tight as a tight shirt, I can't breathe

T

[Orwn Acra]

That solitary T in the last line should concern anyone who believes AIs will not eventually be able to produce art.