In his 1961 short story, “Studio 5, The Stars”, set in the louche, pseudo
paradise of Vermilion Sands, J. G. Ballard presented a vision of the near
future in which poets no longer needed to work at their craft but instead,
via their verse transcribers (VTs), could automatically generate endless
reams of perfect prosody. The story, a meditation on the ability of writing to express something essentially human, ends with the narrator, having been challenged by a sociopathic muse, Aurora Day, writing poetry
by hand after she destroys his VT. This act is repeated by all the poets
across Vermilion Sands.
Ballard’s story, concluding with the narrator rejecting a new order
to replace his VT via the Red Beach branch of IBM (which detail alone
dates this tale), ends with a particularly humanistic vision of a numinous
act: Aurora Day, the “insane” afflatus who disappears as mysteriously
from Vermilion Sands as she appeared, has literally inspired the decadent poets of the idyllic resort to take up their pens once more. Ballard’s
visions of the near future (which would almost certainly, like Stanley
Kubrick’s panoramas of 2001, have existed in our near past) offer a
particularly quaint account of the technology of the VT which – with its
buttons and dials – seems to operate as an analogue machine rather than
a truly digital one. The focus on poetry is not accidental: for Aristotle,
along with music, it was poetry which had the greatest effect upon our
psyche, and since the Romantics, it has become normal to assume that
poetic language is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. Leaving
to one side the various assertions by many cultures outside the Romantic
movement that poetry can often serve much more prosaic or mundane
features (preserving genealogies, for example), poetry has frequently
been denoted as a sign of human ingenuity. Yet in the “mechanical age”
of the nineteenth century, as Jason Hall has demonstrated in great detail, Victorian theorists were deeply concerned with what we would perhaps consider the algorithms of poetry. John Clark (1785–1853) went so
far as to invent the “Eureka”, a “Latin Hexameter Machine” that could
automatically generate Latin verses and which, in 1845, problematised
“the division between the creative capacities of humans and machines”.
1
The Eureka machine, on display in the Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly, had
4 Turing’s Test
Automated Journalism and the
Rise of the Post-Human Writer
paradise of Vermilion Sands, J. G. Ballard presented a vision of the near
future in which poets no longer needed to work at their craft but instead,
via their verse transcribers (VTs), could automatically generate endless
reams of perfect prosody. The story, a meditation on the ability of writing to express something essentially human, ends with the narrator, having been challenged by a sociopathic muse, Aurora Day, writing poetry
by hand after she destroys his VT. This act is repeated by all the poets
across Vermilion Sands.
Ballard’s story, concluding with the narrator rejecting a new order
to replace his VT via the Red Beach branch of IBM (which detail alone
dates this tale), ends with a particularly humanistic vision of a numinous
act: Aurora Day, the “insane” afflatus who disappears as mysteriously
from Vermilion Sands as she appeared, has literally inspired the decadent poets of the idyllic resort to take up their pens once more. Ballard’s
visions of the near future (which would almost certainly, like Stanley
Kubrick’s panoramas of 2001, have existed in our near past) offer a
particularly quaint account of the technology of the VT which – with its
buttons and dials – seems to operate as an analogue machine rather than
a truly digital one. The focus on poetry is not accidental: for Aristotle,
along with music, it was poetry which had the greatest effect upon our
psyche, and since the Romantics, it has become normal to assume that
poetic language is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. Leaving
to one side the various assertions by many cultures outside the Romantic
movement that poetry can often serve much more prosaic or mundane
features (preserving genealogies, for example), poetry has frequently
been denoted as a sign of human ingenuity. Yet in the “mechanical age”
of the nineteenth century, as Jason Hall has demonstrated in great detail, Victorian theorists were deeply concerned with what we would perhaps consider the algorithms of poetry. John Clark (1785–1853) went so
far as to invent the “Eureka”, a “Latin Hexameter Machine” that could
automatically generate Latin verses and which, in 1845, problematised
“the division between the creative capacities of humans and machines”.
1
The Eureka machine, on display in the Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly, had
4 Turing’s Test
Automated Journalism and the
Rise of the Post-Human Writer