Literary Fraud Detector for Sale
for sale: Literary Fraud Detector (LFD)
Easy to install, guaranteed to spot copyright infringements, plagiarisms, impersonations, and bad diction. Ideal for non-native speakers. Now at a special discount rate of 70%, an additional 10% for students and seniors. Get yours today. All major credit cards accepted. $0.99 or best offer. LFD Inc.
The basic idea is to use the Pretend operator Pxyz where x pretends to be y who pretends to be z, where P can have 1, 2, or 3 arguments (variables). For example, Pxx means x is pretending to be itself x. Pxy means x is pretending to be y, etc. Px means x is not pretending to be anything except itself. Notice that Px and Pxx are equal.
Now Keith Holyoak presents a problem of distinguishing a poem written by AI and a poem written by a homo sapien, as versions 1 and 2, and we are to decide which is produced by AI and which is authored by a real human poet.
I would say that both poems are passable as poems. They both have structure and meaning, and employing poetic elements. They could have both been written by a human or by AI but we are told exactly one of them is AI. And we are to decide which is which and which is a “better” poem and why we think so. The poems are as follows:
The Sifter (version 1)
In the quiet dusk, where shadows lie,
The weight of years begins to sigh.
I trace the path where I once stood,
A soul, unsure if wrong or good.
The sum of days, a fragile thread,
Each step I’ve taken, each word I’ve said.
Mistakes, like ashes, drift away,
Yet golden specks of joy will stay.
Through endless night, I search and seek,
A spark of grace, though past is bleak.
In every choice, a price was paid,
In every loss, a lesson made.
Now, on this shore, I stand alone,
The future dim, the past unknown.
But in the ashes, I will find,
The scattered light that heals the mind.
For even in regret’s cold hue,
A fleeting truth may still break through.
And
The Sifter (version 2)
Here at the end, the mind can only rake
Through the cold ashes of memory,
Hoping perhaps to salvage a gem or two
Wrapped in the tar congealed under debris;
But what you seek is last year’s first snowflake—
What’s left to find are broken bits of you.
the way the sea grass undulates
beneath slow swells
you move beneath me
Those other worlds you dreamed or might have dreamed
Are gone—the time to weave and weld has passed.
Wandering through the ruins of tears and laughter
You might despair that everything is lost,
But precious fragments still may be redeemed—
No more the builder, now you are the sifter.
the newborn’s eyes ask who are you
my eyes answer
guess we’ll see
Using the Literary Fraud Detector Pxyz, I determine that version 2 is more likely written by a human. For although both poems have formal structures and meaning, the first being nearly an iambic tetrameter, while the version 2 is closer to an iambic pentameter. Both have rhyming schemes.
However, the first one seems more like a closed system of platitudes that are somewhat abstract and general with one voice of the internal monologue, while the second poem the speaker addresses himself, another person, and a third. It seems that it is a human focusing attention to the physical world while also analyzing and questioning himself. There is more variety of observable and active scenes going on in the second.
Because the first poem consists of 9 rhyming couplets, none of them seem to take place in real time; it is in the mind of the monologuing person. He is shifting his past experiences. The second poem, there is thinking of the past, speaking to someone (the ”you” in the first interlude of 3 Haiku-like lines in real time and attention is given to a baby in the second interlude. It seems more like an open system, where new information is coming in. The first could be a “brain in a vat” while the second is more concrete and worldly, that is, there is real action going on besides remembering.
I would still say that “better” in this sense means we try to favor the human rather than the machine. However, I do not believe that in principle, one can always tell which is which, since, the machine can learn enough to sound like a human and escape detection it is a machine. However, the second poem seems more jagged in a sense, because sonically it is more complicated and less singsong. The first seems a bit repetitious, while the second seems to jump around as if it is more than a brain in a vat but it also has organs of perception.
fivewillowsliteraryreview.blog 