Prove You're Not A Robot With The 'Bot Or Not?' Poetry Challenge

awaken to fly

all these years

to another day

notions of tangled trees

the other side of water

I see it is already here

sequences of her face

see it is shared

and old friends passed their dreams

- "Smoke," 2014

For centuries, man has struggled to standardize a psychovisual lexicon upon which poetry's elusive affect can be universally defined: to one reader, the above poem conjures the fleeting memory of a lost friend: perhaps it's through the haze of nostalgia, or the rhythmic cascade of line breaks, that the mind's eye is inscribed with the image of a woman's face in a wisp of smoke. To another reader, it presents little more than an arbitrary ordered list of prepositions and verb phrases.

In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Harrison Ford's character, Rick Deckard, must decide what it means to be human, when saddled with the task of interrogating humans and humanoid androids with a specialized sort of personality test. By reading the above poem, you, too, have been invited to divine your own humanity in the words of another. Does it change your opinion of the above words to know that they were authored by a robot? Can you even tell the difference?

"Bot or Not?"

The question was posed by programmers and poets Benjamin Laird and Oscar Schwartz as part of the Digital Writers Festival, a self-described, "online carnival dedicated to what happens when technology and the written word collide." Bot or Not challenges readers to decide upon the authorship of a series of ten poems, by human and cybernetic authors, alike.

"Smoke," the poem featured above, was created by Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet, a screensaver that writes poetry from an algorithm based on indexed and recontextualized "poetic personalities," of historic human authors. Other authors in the challenge run the gamut from Google Autofill Poetry to Gertrude Stein.

Does it change your opinion of the above to know that its author has never "seen" smoke? Never passed through "tangled trees," in order to describe, "the other side of water?" Does it delight or infuriate you to know that its author, while physically incapable of imagination, can easily fake it? If, say, you were cyber-courted by a mysterious stranger with a powerful command over the art, could could you tell if they were cell- or code- based?

It's not an easy task in our ever-digitizing age, and even less so when the world's greatest programmers are improving computer poetry as we speak, but at least, with a little practice in "Bot or Not's" Free Play mode, you might stand a fighting chance.

Lead image via