That actually is incredibly beautiful. It's crazy to think that the machine that generated it was devoid of the emotions behind this assembly of words.
> VillanelleBot, created by Felix Jung, is a bot that composes villanelles using random posts from Twitter. Each line corresponds to a full post on Twitter
If you click on the line it goes through to the tweet e.g.
The common distinction between machine and life seems arbitrary. Suppose for instance you had essentially infinite resources to design a machine that self-replicates by stealing blood from mammals, etc etc. You would end up with something very much like the mosquito. Why is it a machine only when man designs it?
This is perhaps more apparent with viruses. They aren't living per se, but are halfway there. The assertion that the virus is not a machine seems to be a difference without a distinction.
Followers of computer generated literature may recall "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed" [1], ostensibly written by the program Racter [2] (though that authorship was never conclusively proven).
When you just set an AI to generate content based on input text, you get garbage like this. You need to set restraints and create a form to work in. An "AI" (i.e. probably a markov chain) spewing out word salad just isn't interesting in 2016 unless it has conceptual weight.
This reminds me of that AI-written screenplay earlier this year [1]... it's interesting, it may be progress, but it's partly carried by its presentation and production value and the promo value of "who" it was authored by. (This is also true, to a lesser degree, of human works.) Fingers crossed for progress.
"I Ate Curly Fries And Shaker Fries" wouldn't be out of place in well-regarded literary magazines. That slice-of-life with references-only-the-author-gets but maybe-sometimes-they-resonate-in-an-oblique-way-with-the-reader poetry is pretty common. Get an author with a decent bio[1] to submit it and I bet you could get a similar-quality machine-generated work published in Ploughshares or similar.
[1] MFA, edits a local poetry magazine with a circulation of 100, accepted submissions to some mid-level publications, one or two "chapbooks" out.
Try submitting it. It will get rejected immediately becasue a) villanelle's are hokey and played out and b) it's obvious this was written by a machine. There's no poetic turn, there's nothing worthwhile to derive from it. It's word salad. There's a reason why Oulipo, whose members have written many algorithmic poems plays and novels, despised chance generations of text.
