Criticism

Poetic Machines 05

By Christian Bök

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“I can do what you do, but I can never feel human emotions as such. I suppose that it does. Yes I think that this is too soft, but I’m not completely sure. This seems okay to me. What is not to like about it? Yes, I think that this is how I like it, but I’m not completely sure. Yes, I think that this is alright, but I’m not completely sure. I think that he is there. Why don’t you ask him? I think that he is breathing. Why don’t you ask him? Yes, I think that this is him, but I’m not completely sure. Yes, I think that this is near, but I’m not completely sure. Yes, I think that this is hard, but I’m not completely sure. Yes, I think that this is cold, but I’m not completely sure. I suppose that it does. Yes I think that this heavy, but I’m not completely sure. Yes, I always have to carry it far. I can’t really speak for them. Yes, I think that is where we get off, but I’m not completely sure. The red one, I think. We are just having a little chat.”
First 20 Questions
in Sunset Debris
by Ron Silliman
(all answered by A.L.I.C.E)
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A.L.I.C.E is a chatbot that simulates the experience of conversation, and it has won the Loebner Prize (2004) for the quality of its dialogue. Each year Hugh Loebner awards an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal to the digital program most able to mimic conversation with a human being. Each contestant competes with other entrants in a Turing Test, and the most convincing contestant wins the award, regardless of whether or not such software might constitute a perfect program. The patron of the award admits that, even though entrants in the early years of the prize are going to be primitive, their inadequacies provide incentives for others to enter the contest with improved variants, and he hopes eventually to award $100,000 and a gold medal to the first machine that can ape anthropic sentience. You can find an essay about the rationale for such an award at this site.
The New Athenians have argued on behalf of “conversation” without considering the degree to which our own dialogue in the modern milieu has become completely transected by dialogue with machines themselves, whether they be automated operators on telephones or simulated opponents in videogames—and advances in computerized intelligence are only going to make these facsimiles more and more difficult to distinguish from actual people, until eventually we might not care to make the distinction when we interact through our media. While we might take solace in our own anthropic prejudice, dismissing the nonsensical communiqués of such chatbots as nothing more than computerized gobbledygook, we might unwittingly miss a chance to study firsthand the babytalk of an embryonic sentience, struggling abortively to awaken from its own phylum of oblivion.
I believe that, at the very least, such machines offer a powerful appliance for generating poetry that might have its own unique styles of expression (as suggested, for example, by my whimsical theatrics, pairing off A.L.I.C.E with Ron Silliman in a “conversation” that begins to take on some of the repetitive resonances of Gertrude Stein—a writer only one remove from another “Alice” in the biography of avant-garde practice). I might suggest that, as the advancing, aesthetic potential of our machines begins increasingly to discredit the romantic paradigm of inspiration, poets of the future might have to take refuge in a new set of aesthetic metaphors for the unconscious, adapting by adopting a machinic attitude, placing the mind on autopilot in order to follow a remote-controlled navigation-system of mechanical, conceptual procedures—be they automatic, aleatoric, or mannerist, in their theories….

2007-11-26

Posted in Criticism, Group Blog on Monday, November 26th, 2007 by Christian Bök.