MoMA poet laureate Kenneth Goldsmith takes the spotlight in the following preview for Noriginals: The Art of Uncreativity, a “multi-platform feature documentary” exploring creativity in the age of algorithms:
Meanwhile, Johannah King-Slutzky explores the field of robopoetics (RP):
Is anything about computer-generated poetry radically new? Mostly, yes. Robopoetics challenge several conventional theories about literature and bolster other claims (like Barthes’ death of the author) with hard, non-theoretical proof. In electronic literature there is no dyadic author and text: the new creative schema is a triad of programmer, robotic author, and text. Robopoetics shifts the burden of creativity onto programming and the selection of source materials. (If you’re feeling contrarian you might argue that this contemporary triad isn’t so different from the classical muse-author-text model, but anyway.) …
I’ve written and read more than the average amount of poetry, but somehow amidst all the difficult poetry, I forgot that relatability and straightforwardness are the marks of a mature poet, too. Once, I read computer-generated poetry for 10 hours straight. The next week I could only stomach plainspoken Du Fu. I had to turn the clock back 1200 years. In this and other ways, games like Bot or Not might be a good learning tool. The same skill you refine by playing Bot or Not—the detection of gibberish—can also assist in separating the livejournal from the laureate. … In the words of Bot or Not’s creator, “The ability to tell whether something is of human or computer provenance … might become really important. We will all be like blade runner people, trying to tell if a text is human.”
The Dish 