Thursday, April 27, 2006
Releasing ETC into the wild
Some readers have asked who "owns" the poems ETC generates on the main Web site. In short, anyone who wants to. As far as we are concerned, all the generated texts are in the public domain. Feel free to use them in any way you'd like.
Others have asked if it's OK to try to publish a piece they've had ETC compose. See above.
In Virtual Muse Charles Hartman talks about how the texts his software wrote didn't rise to the quality of human poetry, but that the same texts did hold promise and noted how hard it is to resist tinkering with them--the poetry machine as electronic muse, not just electronic author.
There are all kinds of ways to strap on the prosthetic imagination and prepare a poem for submission. You can take a machine poem to a poetry workshop (this is way fun if you don't tell anyone where the poem came from) and incorporate the group's suggestions. You can take lines from different poems and meld them into a single composition. You can compose a poem, then use some of its words as seed words for another--a kind of interactive, a little-at-a-time writing process. You can compose several short poems using the same options and then use those as stanzas in a larger composition.
The desktop version of the software has options to generate poems in batch mode. The user can have the machine write 100's of poems using the same parameters. Because this is such a long and computationally expensive process (we usually run the monster overnight), we can't make it available on the Web. We have utilities to convert and aggregate the batched poems into a word processing document. Then the user can just go through and delete all the bad work (and ETC comes up with a lot of bad work) and use what's left as a candidate for submission. That's how we composed "13 digital pumpkin seeds, algorithmically composed."
If you do submit a piece written with ETC's assistance and would like to publicize that fact, just let us know and we'll put your piece up on the ETC site, along with as much of the story of its genesis as you'd like to tell.
# posted by Jim @ 9:42 AM 
