US poet Allen Ginsberg once said, "Poetry (诗歌) is one place where people can speak their original (独创的) human mind. "
To know the special ability of poetry to catch the human spirit, World Poetry Day is held by the United Nations on March 21 each year.
The magic of poetry lies in the connection built up through words between the writer and the reader. When we read a poem, we often imagine what the poet was thinking when they wrote it, or what they were doing at the time. These thoughts let us connect with the words better, as if (似乎) we'd written the poem ourselves.
But in the age of artificial intelligence (人工智能), would a poem still mean as much if it weren't written by a human at all? Today, computers can create all kinds of texts, including research papers, books, news stories and even poems.
In 2013, Australian researcher Oscar Schwartz and his friend Benjamin Laird created a website called "bot or not", where readers can read poems and guess whether they were written by a human or a computer. During a recent speech at TEDx Sydney, Schwartz said that all over the years, some of the website's poems were able to fool (欺骗) 65 percent of human readers into thinking they were written by a human.
By creating the website, Schwartz hoped that people would doubt the difference between humans and machines – and be able to tell what makes us human.
"The human mind is not a cold, hard fact," Schwartz said during his speech. A computer may be able to create poems that are correct in both grammar and style, but it wouldn't be able to get the same meanings and feelings across as a human poet could.
