He held out a hand
Of injured pride she started
In the Richard Powers novel Galatea 2.2, a cognitive neurologist and a novelist endeavor to create a neural net sentient enough to pass a PhD comprehensive in English literature. The machine, dubbed Helen, ultimately develops a mind of its own. Eric Elshtain and Jon Trowbridge aren’t quite that far along with their Gnoetry poetry-writing program yet–but then they’re only on version 0.2.
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“Haiku machines have been around for a while,” Elshtain says. “As far as we were concerned they would just spew out these strings of gobbledygook.” Early poetry programs were hampered by primitive computing power, Trowbridge explains. And a lot were no better than Mad-Libs, “massive computer-generated fill-in-the-blank. Give me a verb, give me a noun, then plug them in and get a sentence. There’s no real structure there. You get stuff correct in some grammatical sense, but it turns out sounding like bad stream of consciousness.”
Trowbridge claims this is beyond his ken. “I don’t know anything about poetry. I can write an algorithm,” he says. Elshtain, on the other hand, is a former poetry editor for the Chicago Review who’s had his work published in journals like McSweeney’s and Ploughshares (his mother, Jean Bethke Elshtain, is a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School).
A very matey scheme. The storm, the thing.
Again. The thought amuses you? The thing?
