Verge 2014

Oscar Schwartz is writing his PhD thesis at Monash University on the subject of whether computers can write poetry. In order to answer this broad question he devised a conceptual model based on the Turing Test. Basically, in collaboration with Benjamin Laird, he created a website called bot or not, which acts as a Turing Test for poetry. The user is presented with a poem - either written by a human or computer generated - and then they have to guess which is which.

In 2015 he won the inaugural The Lifted Brow (TLB) Prize for Experimental Nonfiction for his piece `Humans Pretending to be Computers Pretending to be Human¿. Schwartz was selected from a shortlist of four for the award. The $1000 award sought to `unearth new, audacious, authentic and/or inauthentic voices¿ from Australia and around the world.

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