Computers Suck at Poetry

A poetic Turing test was held at Dartmouth yesterday to pit artificial intelligence against human poets, AP reported. Good news: the computers lost. Judges could easily tell the difference between robot-written sonnets. One of the judges, Harvard English professor and New Yorker contributor Louis Menand, cited syntactical oddities and "uses of language that were just a little off," as reasons why the AI-written sonnets stuck out as so obviously fraudulent. Machines are getting better at natural language.