I love it when I read song translations that are borderline nonsensical (likely because the translator couldn’t/didn’t bother to try to understand it themselves) and then see comments like, “this is so deep” and people trying to assign great meaning to what is basically an incomprehensible set of lyrics lol

It reminds me of an article I read a while back about a programming experiment that intended to teach computers how to write poetry (one bot poem even won a poetry contest lol). The people behind it set up a website challenging people to guess if certain poems were written by a bot or human and, to their shock, over 50% of the time people incorrectly guessed that the bot poems were real poems. They suspect it was because the computer had learned how to make some epic sounding phrases that people assumed were metaphors for some deep meaning, but actually meant absolutely nothing. Likewise, since there are so many real poems in the world that are difficult to make sense of, this experiment ended up being a good example of showing how fine the line is between absurdity and genius when it comes to art.

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    That is really interesting – I think I remember reading something about that once. But I have one quibble with the conclusion of this — isn’t interpretation of art, regardless of creator, up to the interpreter? I’ve always held that it doesn’t matter what the author/artist intended, as all viewers will bring their own meaning to any interpretation and understanding of art. Calling bot-created poems that have confusing parts that are up to interpretation is what art is all about in my opinion. Things don’t always have to make sense to all people to be meaningful. However, if people just thought that the bot created poems were “real poems” because of the complex language, without actually examining the poem itself for meaning, then sure, that is a little absurd. But I think it’s also impossible to read poetry without assigning meaning to it, so in a way it isn’t really absurd and the bot-created poetry is no less “real” than the manmade poetry.

    Sorry to get all complicated on you – I just studied both English and Philosophy in university and this was an argument I had in one of my classes. I just have this strong belief that when art is released into the world its creator no longer has any real right to tell others how to understand it, which I think is equally applicable to bot-created poetry.Maybe that is absurd, but isn’t that just humanity in a nutshell?

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    Well i wonder.. they have been trying to use bots in creative field.. they had bot design the trailer of the movie and human team simultaneously.. it turned out to be pretty close..

    so, i won’t say creativity is a foray out of reach for bots.. ultimately for us too.. it is a complex mechanism of electro bio signals

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