The Artificial Poetry: On the Embarrassing Secret of Poetic Bots

Abstract

The paper describes the origins and structure of artificial poetry, i.e. poetry created by programs (nowadays mainly bots based on artificial neural networks). It points out the difficulties involved in detecting human authorship of poems and the development of detection strategies in new research on artificial poetry. Author claims that traditional methods of text analysis are not sufficient to demonstrate human authorship. However, we must take into account, firstly, the embarrassing secret of poetic bots: indistinguishability is the result of human intervention in the editing process of artificial poems; secondly, the fact that poetic Turing tests carry the dubious assumption of the existence of a pattern of human poeticity.