Bards and Bytes

The Future of Life Institute, a think tank in Boston, predicts that artificial intelligence will write bestsellers by 2050, and we’re already on our way. In 2017, Cheers Publishing in China produced Sunshine Misses Windows, a volume of 139 poems created by a Microsoft chatbot that mimics human conversation, or tries to. In short, the computer was fed an image — say, a landscape of rocks, trees, and fog — and instructed to riff. It studied the picture using the GoogleNet algorithm and compared keywords with thousands of previous (albeit human-generated) Chinese poems. The result is a new one: “Wings hold rocks and water tightly / In the loneliness / Stroll the empty / The land becomes soft.”

Robert Lowell was a collector: tools, marbles, butterflies, snakes, turtles, books about Napoleon. “I caught over thirty turtles,” the poet wrote, “and put them in a well where they died of insufficient feeding.” None of this, he admitted, led anywhere. But, of course...