Kurzweil Gets A Patent For Poetic Software

theodp writes "Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind, has developed what he calls a cybernetic poet, software that allows a computer to create poetry by imitating but not plagiarizing the styles and vocabularies of human poets. A sample: 'Sashay down the page...through the lioness...nestled in my soul.' Impressed? The USPTO, who sponsored the Independent Inventors Conference Mr. Kurzweil spoke at on Nov. 17, seems to be. On Nov. 11, Ray Kurzweil received U.S. Patent No. 6,647,395 for Poet Personalities."

Re:There isn't enough classic poetry out there?

/usr/games/fortune -o limerick

Re:There isn't enough classic poetry out there?

(In Brooklyn accent) I gotcher classics right here: Here I sit, all broken-hearted. Tried to SCO, but only farted.

Maybe

Maybe that's why those darned Vogons are so intent on building that hyperspace bypass here...

Patent lawyers on Ark B, and Vogon poetry

Maybe that's why those darned Vogons are so intent on building that hyperspace bypass here...

You're spot on, but for the wrong reason. The Vogons never really considered the Kurzweil poet AI as worthy competition for their poetry, but this possibility did give the mice an excellent excuse for having the Earth destroyed while hiding the real reason why this had to be done.

Because you see, earlier in the experiment that led to the creation of planet Earth, a catastrophic error was made: they forgot to weed out latent patent clerks from among the management consultants and telephone sanitizers that were sent off on Ark B, as a result of which by the end of the 2nd millennium the planet was completely overrun with demented patent clerks that brought all technical progress to a standstill.

While some computer scientists (well, OK, just Bill Joy) declared this to be conclusive proof for the Halting Problem, all sentient life everywhere recognized the extreme danger of Earth's patent clerk infecting the rest of the universe with insanity, so planetary termination became non-optional.

The Vogons were of course happy to carry out the task, but their fondness for hyperspace bypasses really had nothing to do with it. To understand the Vogon eagerness to destroy Earth, you just need to consider the fact that patent clerks cannot distinguish original poetry from age-old nursery rhymes, and being non-sentient, nor can they feel the sadistic pain of Vogon poetry recitals. Put those two things together and it was only a question of which Vogon captain would reach Earth first. Even without the benefit of a Vogon background, it's easy to see their point.

Link to program

Here [kurzweilcyberart.com] is a link to the site where you can download this program.

Great

Now my computer's going to get laid more then me.

This saddens me.

Poetic justice is pending.

Re:Not convincing

None of the haikus under the "More Poetry" link have the correct number of syllables.

Properly speaking, that is, in Japanese, haiku are not specified in terms of syllables. They're specified in terms of moras (Japanese onsetsu), the things of which a light syllable has one and a heavy syllable has two (or occasionally three). For example, here's a well known classic haiku:

na ra na na e
shi chi doo ga ran
ya e za ku ra

I've broken it down into syllables. As you can see, there are five in each line. The reason this is well-formed is that the syllable doo counts as two moras since it has a long vowel and the syllable ran counts as two moras since it has a closing consonant. So the second line contains seven moras even though it only contains five syllables. In sum, a haiku is a poem whose lines contain 5, 7, and 5 moras. How this should translate into English I don't know. Personally, I think English "haiku" sound funny and favor sticking to Japanese.

I decided to read the patent page.

The first refernce: Patent for "Method and apparatus for generating text", 1987.

The following is an actual paragraph from the newly announced patent:
Referring to FIG. 4, table 56 having words and their associated rhyme numbering is shown for the poem "why go slam, know the lamb." The words "lamb" and "slam" are both numbered .backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other and are placed in a first rhyme set, while "go" and "know" are numbered .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other, and not with "lamb" and "slam," and thus are numbered to indicate membership in a second rhyme set. The resulting poem is; why go .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash.slam.ba ckslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..backsla sh..backslash., know .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. the lamb .backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash..

I can't go on.... I can't see how the patent system is anything but a joke, one that does good for nobody but the lawyers.

Re:I decided to read the patent page.

If you looked at the image of the patent it would be a lot more readable. The .backslash. is just a code that the uspto uses to substitue for "\" to make it easier for their search engine to handle it. It does similar things with divide, multiple, integrals, paragraph characters, square roots, etc...

Now that the program has been patented...

...I keep getting the same poem.

A patent has been granted
Giving backing to my lines,
So if you write some similar code
You'll face some hefty fines.

Haiku Night on Slashdot

My haiku:

Tonight On Slashdot
Kurzweil Poetry Machine
Please don't mod me down

... Maybe I shouldn't quit my day job.

Re:Haiku Night on Slashdot

the best haiku (slightly) related to artificial intelligence:

Is the Twinkie smart?
Is it just ignoring us?
Maybe never know.

From a twinkie-related website the URL of which I have unfortunately forgotten. And come to think of it, given the ingredients present in Twinkies, I think 'artificial intelligence' is rather appropriate.

Re:Haiku Night on Slashdot

1. First post! is better
than a beowulf cluster, but
does it run linux?

2. Bittorrent pr0n shared,
but rights of the goatse guy
are belong to us!

3. I A N A L,
But Microsoft and SCO says:
"This is Chewbacca."

4. Yet in other news,
polls show insensitive clods
are from America.

5. Natalie Portman,
both naked and petrified,
covered with hot grits!

6. ?

7. In Soviet Russia,
overlords, for one, welcome
Cowboyneal's profits!

thats wonderful

And the best part is it only takes 556 gigs of reference material to do something along the lines of "the cat is fat".

Re:thats wonderful

Shouldn't that be "the waistline of the feline is porcine"?

After looking at this closer...

I'm unimpressed.

It's AI seems only capable of duplicating style...but it turns out peoms that make no sense. It seems to have no concept of word relationships, outside of simple grammar and organization.

Like I said, gimme Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson...who needs this?

Clif

Re:And looking at it even closer...

Here you go, W.C.Williams....

So much (i.e. my
Pulitzer)

depends upon an ambiguous
statement

with no actual
application

beside a bland
image

--
That's mine. Oh, and here's one from my lit book, by Kenneth Koch, tearing apart the silly Plums one

"Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams"

1

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2

We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3

I gave away the money that you have been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

--
No, the patent is overkill. W.C.W. could be replaced with a very short shell script.

Re:After looking at this closer...

The sad thing is that most modern poetry really isn't any different from the stuff this program produces. Randomness and Hip Vagueness have pretty well killed any popular taste for poetry. After all, why read poetry when most of it appears to have no meaning and have required no talent?

This is where modern art has led us. The end result of trashing common sense [cwd.co.uk] is the heat death of the literary world. Everyone is a poet, therefore no one is a poet.

This person [kuro5hin.org] said it rather well. I have this only to add: the question is not whether art should change, but whether art should become intrinsically worthless.

-JD

Re:After looking at this closer...

Most poetry during ANY period is trash. The difference now is that literally anything can be published.

Nearly all great works of art that we know of were panned severely when they first appeared. A great work of art creates something that is unexpected, and which we are unprepared for. (Not that I'm claiming that THIS was great art...most, as I said, really *IS* garbage. But don't judge based on initial reactions.)

Most good works of art are appreciated... and performed on commission. They are refinements of prior works and ideas. This doesn't make them less powerful, but it makes it easier for people to appreciate them.

Many schools of art don't really have room inside them for many great, or even very good, pieces. So people who keep trying for great novelty are continually trying to create totally novel ways of expressing themselves...ways outside of any extant school. Unfortunately(?), there appear to be limits as to what people can, even over time, learn to appreciate.

If one is willing to be satisfied with good, and very good, however, there are many classic schools that appear to be deep enough that any one person can never plumb their depths. The saga is one such form. It's not popular now because it DOES require a prolonged attention span to appreciate it. And it's difficult, requiring much craftsmanship. in it's place we have positioned the novel. A form that is at least as deep, somewhat wider, and which doesn't require as much skill to produce acceptable works. And which also can require less attention on the part of the audience. (This last *isn't* guaranteed. Many very good novels require, or at least reward, the same degree of attention that any epic poem can require.)

OTOH, even quite restricted formulae, e.g. the Haiku, can be quite expressive over a wide variety of issues. (Here I mean the strict form of Haiku, including the strictures of seasonal references as well as length and stress patterns.) For that matter, if it weren't for historical context (e.g., it's popularisation by Edward Lear), the Limerick might well be an equally expressive form. I've done a bit of experimenting, and I don't find it intrinsically any less or more confining than the Haiku. But the audience expectations mean that it can be difficult to deal with serious topics (unless the wry twist is a part of the point).

As to "modern poetry". Perhaps you should choose a different selection of poets. Julia Winograd, e.g., is a noted modern poet, and her works are quite accessible. They aren't, however, light. She lives among the poor, and reveals the darkness that they dwell in, without being maudlin. I know that you can purchase her works at Codys Books in Berkeley, although I don't find them in the on-line store (apache internal error). And Google doesn't seem to know her. But she has many collections published...self published, actually, but they've been on sale for years.

P.S.: This may partially explain why you think modern poetry is bad. I hadn't realized how difficult it was to find her works. Perhaps the publishers won't publish anything that they find offensive. After all, poetry isn't a moneymaker except on a very small scale. I do know that even recognized authors have difficulty getting poetry published. You may be able to find Logan by Paul Edwin Zimmer (or possibly Zimmer-Bradley). It was published once that I know of, and deals with classic american themes. In this case how the Iroquois nation was destroyed, and by who. And is in a classic form. And it was only included because 1) his sister was a best selling author, and 2) the editor was determined to include it. Yet it is a poem so moving that I had great trouble reading it. It should be a part of every history cirriculum, as it covers the facts of an important period of early american history. And it explores the nature of political action. In it's way it is similar to "Advise and Consent", but it is more factual. (Well, possibly not. I don't really know the background

I remember an app named 'Babble' did the same...

A long time ago, in a gala^h^h^h^h forum on CIS (Compuserve, for you script-kiddies), I downloaded an app named Babble that analyzed text and attempted poetry. Actually, I think analyze is too strong a work for what Babble did. You fed Babble text files of whatever you wanted sampled and babble spit out mixed-up jumbles of phrases. Ninety percent of the time it was utter garbage, not even beat poets would like it. Occasionally it ejected something plausible and possibly poetic. Ah, patience rewarded.

There is prior artwork here. This patent may have trouble remaining. I have never been able to find this app, but anyone else should be able to scan some DOS libraries and might find it. Go, find the app and stop the patent madness.

poem of the day

I, for one,
welcome our
new cybernetic
poet overlords.

machine generated apathy, stop this

1984 anyone?
"It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!"

Please help stop software patentability in the EU [compsoc.com]. (coz I want to write this program! okay, not really)

similar programs out there?

I've been working on a project (nicknamed "beat geek" in my head) that uses the digital equivalents of dada/beat cut-up techniques and other forms of randomness in or artificial generation of language.

For example, I have a program called autopoem (written by Bill Sethares [wisc.edu]) loosely based on an idea from Shannon's original paper on information theory.

Suppose you took all the words in the English language and calculated how often the character "s" is followed by the character "t", the character "e", and so on. You'd end with a table of transition probabilities that showed how often each letter is followed by any other letter (or punctuation mark or space) and starting with a single seed letter you could generate "english-like" words randomly. The output using the probability that a single letter is followed by another letter doesn't actually resemble English much, nor does the output using probabilities based on two letter combinations (how often is "th" followed by "e", by "a", and so on) but by the time you get to 3 letter combinations, (how often is "the" followed by "a" or by "s") the output starts to look a lot like "twas brillig and the slithy toves", like ye olde englishe with very creative spelling.

The scheme I described above is difficult to implement in practice, because the table of probabilities gets big fast as the number of letters used to determine the next letter gets longer. Autopoem uses a particular text as a source and instead of generating a table of probabilities it scans the text looking for the next of the letter sequence, say "the", and then selects whatever letter or punctuation mark comes next, say "a", then it continues scanning until it finds the next occurrence of "hea", and selects the following letter, and so on. the longer the sequence of letters, the more likely it is that whole words or phrases from the original text will appear in the output. An alternative version, requiring a reasonably long text, applies the same principle on the word level, how often is the word "red" followed by the word "hat" or "dog" or so on.

Here's some autopoem output:

Your strip of entirely
tired witches scarecrow me at night
That reached the next
He witches at and glow in a cruel head
Done behind the mark

Nothing but the Land of blue
And the green wizard answer with sharp teeth

(anyone care to guess the source text?)

Other ideas/algorithms/programs that fall into the same genre are dilbert's corporate values generator (now defunct?), eliza (especially when she interacts with zippy), madlibs (I don't know of a computer application), scott reynen's poetry [randomchaos.com] and prose [randomchaos.com] generators, rob malda's poetry generator (currently offline) & googlism [googlism.com].

Any suggestions or links to related programs would be greatly appreciated.

Uhhh... can it count?

Their website has this as a haiku written after reading various authors:

You broke my soul
the juice of eternity,
the spirit of my lips.

But it doesn't work out. The first line is four syllables, while the last line is 6. Haiku are 5-7-5. Silly computers, they must have taken the adding chip out of that one.

Slightly OT, but both /. and poetry-related

I wrote a poem for English class once. It was one of those deals where I didn't have anything to write about. So I started reading Slashdot. This was at the time where there were three Palladium/TCPA/WTF-it's-now stories a day, as opposed to three SCO stories a day. To make a long story short, I wrote one of those poems that wasn't about Palladium, but really it was. Damn, I thought I had just written an absolute POS.

I was very surprised when my English teacher really liked it. She liked it so much that she entered it in a state-wide contest for high school students.

Yeah. Well, my poem won. So I get to read it at the sponsoring organization's next meeting. I go there and, of course, I see that my poem had been selected as the best by none other than old ladies and somewhat-less-than-straight men. One of the old ladies told me that my entry was one of the more "interesting" ones she'd seen.

So, uh, yeah... that's my story...

We don't need a machine to do this...

We should just take already existing poems, have them translated into Japanese, and then have the Japanese translate it back into English. Put it all together and voila!:

All your base are belong to us.

Problems with computer poetry as a sign of intel..

Eschewing the patent issue for a moment and focusing on the question of whether poetry consitutes artificial intelligence, the question is: whose intelligence?

I read Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines and he had various samples of computer poetry there. I remember thinking that one of them was stunningly good, at least to my taste.

But I also found myself wondering... how many (hundreds of? thousands of?) poems were discarded by humans in an attempt to find a couple good ones, and is this vaunted computer poetry really mostly a product of human selection from reams of pseudo-sensical word combinations? I never saw any disclosure or discussion of these sorts of factors in Kurzweil's writings. Keep your eye out for this.

--LP

Sounds familiar

I can't believe noone yet mentioned Stanislav
Lem. One his more humorous stories dealt with
a similar machine though one that could
produce real poetry, meaningful, beautifully
written and confroming to arbitrary constraints,
like one where all words had to begin with same
letter. If you read the story you know this
invention will lead to no good.

Would it be fair to say...

...that in granting Kurzweil a patent on software that composes poetry, the government has issued him a poetic license?

Or perhaps it's simply poetic justice that such a seemingly silly patent should be issued.

No matter how bad things were already, with the advent of digital poetry, I can't help but think that things have gotten a bit verse.

Computer chips on a wet black bough

I can't believe nobody has asked this question: what's the point? Humans write poetry in order to express a thought, idea or emotion; it's just as hackneyed if I read a bunch of Frost or Empson poems and slice and dice 'em together to create my own masterpiece, so why is it better that a computer can do so?

When I read poetry, I like to have the illusion that what I am reading was carefully thought about and created; trying to find meaning in a computer generated poem is as pointless as trying to find meaning in a book from Borges' Library of Babel.

How is this different/better than Racter?

In the 80's a man by the name of William Chamberlain wrote a program called Racter [robotwisdom.com], which had the ability to write poetry. Racter even has a book out called The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed.

Racter had two serious objections. For one, Racter's poetry sounds much like the ramblings of a madman, e.g.:

• Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting

The other serious objection people have to Racter is that because the author had such a strong influence on the parameters used to generate the poetry that he is the true author and not the computer.

If these same objections can be applied to Kurzweil's work, then the cybernetic poet is no better than Racter and isn't particularly interesting. According to the article, the author claims that his program is more sophisticated than other software out there, but the article doesn't include any specific comparisons.

Is this really a major leap forward or is this just another stab at artificial insanity?

Kurzweil story I had posted...

I had posted a story on Kurzweil [neotope.com] that apparently wasn't as interesting as this one, but I think it still is worth mentioning. It's about an article he wrote in which he predicts that our biological lives will be lived mostly within a Matrix-like virtuality by 2050. An intriguing article, but I ultimately disagreed, citing that the global economy is too labor-intensive to allow the transition.