Human or machine: can you tell who wrote these poems?

Mark Frauenfelder 9:09 am Tue Jun 28, 2016

By Mirko Tobias Schaefer [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

NPR has a quiz that invites you to guess which of six poems were written by a computer program, and which were written by humans. A group of 10 judges weren't fooled, but I had trouble correctly guessing all of them. I appreciated the computer-generated poems as much as the human-written ones.

SONNET #2

The dirty rusty wooden dresser drawer.

A couple million people wearing drawers,

Or looking through a lonely oven door,

Flowers covered under marble floors.

And lying sleeping on an open bed.

And I remember having started tripping,

Or any angel hanging overhead,

Without another cup of coffee dripping.

Surrounded by a pretty little sergeant,

Another morning at an early crawl.

And from the other side of my apartment,

An empty room behind the inner wall.

A thousand pictures on the kitchen floor,

Talked about a hundred years or more.

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