Can a computer write poetry?

I have a question:

Can a computer write poetry?`

This is a provocative question.

You think about it for a minute,

and you suddenly have a bunch
of other questions like:

What is a computer?

What is poetry?

What is creativity?

But these are questions that people

spend their entire lifetime
trying to answer,

not in a single TED Talk.

So we're going to have to try
a different approach.

So up here, we have two poems.

One of them is written by a human,

and the other one is written by a computer.

I'm going to ask you to tell me
which one's which.

Have a go.

Alright, time's up.

Hands up if you think Poem 1
was written by a human.

Okay, most of you.

Hands up if you think Poem 2
was written by a human.

Very brave of you.

Because Poem 1 was written
by the human poet William Blake.

The second one was written by
an algorithm

that took all the language
from my Facebook feed one day

and then regenerated it algorithmically

according to methods that I'll describe
a little bit later on.

So let's try another test.

Again, you haven't got ages to read this,

so just trust your gut.

Alright , time's up.

So if you think the first poem
was written by a human,

put your hand up.

Okay.

And if you think the second poem
was written by a human,

put your hand up.

We have, more or less,
a 50/50 split here.

It was much harder.

The answer is,

the first poem was generated
by an algorithm called RACTER

that was created back in the 1970s,

and the second poem was written
by a guy called Frank O'Hara,

who happens to be one
of my favorite human poets.

(Laughter)

So what we've just done now
is the Turing Test for poetry.

The Turing Test was first proposed
by this guy Alan Turing in 1950

in order to answer the question,

can computers think?

Alan Turing believed that if
a computer was able

to have a to have
a text-based conversation

with a human,

with such proficiency that the human
couldn't tell

whether they are talking
to a computer or a human,

then the computer can be said
to have intelligence.

So in 2013, my friend
Benjamin Laird and I,

we created a Turing Test
for poetry online.

It's called Bot or Not,

and you can go and play it
for yourselves.

But basically, it's the game
we just played.

You're presented with a poem,

you don't know whether it was written
by a human or a computer

and you have to guess.

So thousands and thousands
of people

have taken this test online

so we have results.

And what are the results?

Well, Turing said that if
a computer could fool a human

30 percent of the time,

that it was a human,

then it passes the Turing Test
for intelligence.

We have poems on the Bot or Not database

that have fooled 65 percent
of human readers into thinking

it was written by a human.

So, I think we have an answer
to our question.

According to the logic
of the Turing Test,

can a computer write poetry --

well yes, absolutely it can.

But if you're feeling
a little bit uncomfortable

with this answer, that's okay.

If you're having a bunch
of gut reactions to it,

that's also okay because
this isn't the end of the story.

Let's play our third and final test.

Again, you're going to have to read

and tell me which you think is human.

So hands up if you think Poem 1
was written by a human.

Hands up if you think Poem 2
was written by a human.

Woah, that's a lot more people.

So you'd be surprised to find that
Poem 1

was written by the very human poet
Gertrude Stein.

And Poem 2 was generated
by an algorithm called RKCP.

Now before we go on, let me describe,
very quickly and simply,

how RKCP works.

So RKCP is an algorithm
designed by Ray Kurzweil,

who's a director of engineering at Google

and a firm believer in
artificial intelligence.

So, you give RKCP a source test,

it analyzes the source text

in order to find out how it
uses language,

and then it regenerates language

that emulates that first test.

So in the poem we just saw before,

Poem 2, the one that you all
thought was human,

it was fed a bunch of poems

by a poet called Emily Dickinson

and looked at the way she used language,

learned the model,

and then it regenerated a model
according to that same structure.

But the important thing to know
about RKCP

is it doesn't know the meaning
of the words it's using.

The language is just raw material,

it could be Chinese,
it could be in Swedish,

it could be the collected language
from your Facebook feed for one day.

It's just raw material.

And nevertheless, it's able
to create a poem

that seems more human
than Gertrude Stein's poem,

and Gertrude Stein is a human.

So what we've done here is,
more or less, a reverse Turing Test.

So Gertrude Stein, who's a human,

is able to write a poem that fools
a majority of human judges

into thinking that it was written
by a computer.

Therefore, according to the logic
of the reverse Turing Test,

Gertrude Stein is a computer.

(Laughter)

Feeling confused?

I think that's fair enough.

So far we've had humans
that write like humans,

we have computers that write
like computers,

we have computers that
write like humans,

but we also have,

perhaps the most confusingly,

humans that write like computers.

So what do we take from all of this.