this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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237
Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 days ago by Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de to c/technology@lemmy.world
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While I am glad this ruling went this way, why'd she have diss Data to make it?

To support her vision of some future technology, Millett pointed to the Star Trek: The Next Generation character Data, a sentient android who memorably wrote a poem to his cat, which is jokingly mocked by other characters in a 1992 episode called "Schisms." StarTrek.com posted the full poem, but here's a taste:

"Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, / An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature; / Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses / Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations, / A singular development of cat communications / That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection / For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection."

Data "might be worse than ChatGPT at writing poetry," but his "intelligence is comparable to that of a human being," Millet wrote. If AI ever reached Data levels of intelligence, Millett suggested that copyright laws could shift to grant copyrights to AI-authored works. But that time is apparently not now.

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[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 7 points 2 days ago

Somewhere around here I have an old (1970's Dartmouth dialect old) BASIC programming book that includes a type-in program that will write poetry. As I recall, the main problem with it did be that it lacked the singular past tense and the fixed rules kind of regenerated it. You may have tripped over the main one in the last sentence; "did be" do be pretty weird, after all.

The poems were otherwise fairly interesting, at least for five minutes after the hour of typing in the program.

I'd like to give one of the examples from the book, but I don't seem to be able to find it right now.