Why do we mistake computer generated poems as the work of humans? — From Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” to Eavan Boland’s “figure in which secret things confide,” poetry is often defined by — and extolled for — its ability to convey human emotion. What, then, does it mean that we can’t distinguish poems penned by humans from those generated by machine? …

Here’s What Happened… In July of 2020 I noticed a significant gender imbalance in the carousels Google returned with my poetry search queries — not even 10% of the work included was authored by women. …

Are all the great poets dead? — In mid July of 2020, I opened my browser and searched for ‘love poems.’ Above the results, Google returned a carousel — a horizontally scrolling menu containing poems, each identified with a title and image that linked to more information. Of over thirty poems in the carousel, only two were…

A study of Wikipedia citations — A little over a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation released a long list of the publications cited on all Wikipedias (English speakers often think only of the English Wikipedia, but there are now 306 Wikipedias in different languages). The citation list, which contains over 15 million records, captures only a…

Using technology to monitor and protect the environment Cellphones have become such an integral part of day-to-day life that researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago have studied what they call ‘phone walking’ — visibly holding a phone without using it. …

“Algorithms can’t comprehend truth. They just repeat the past.” — Cathy O’Neil Ethics in algorithm-based decision making has been much in my thoughts ever since I read Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, which makes a compelling argument that our algorithms are perpetuating, solidifying and even magnifying patterns of injustice…

Our history, our literature, and our responsibility My maternal grandparents arrived in the United States with my uncle, then an infant, in 1937, escaping a world of violence, curfews and concentrations camps for one in which, only a few years later, Japanese Americans were interned en masse. The incarceration of…

The troubled gaze of an artificial intelligence — The other day, I ran a photograph of my penis potato through an AI to see what the technology would call it. Would it know my potato was a potato despite the penis-like protuberance that had earned the tuber its nickname?

Ursula K. LeGuin writes, “Greatness, in the sense of outstanding or unique accomplishment, is a cryptogendered word. In ordinary usage and common understanding, “a great American” means a great American man, “a great writer” means a great male writer.” I think what LeGuin says is true. The meager representation of…