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My post of October 6, 2020 presented a poem composed in the manner of something that could have been created by artificial intelligence. I like the idea of (more or less) randomly choosing brief passages from different books, and presenting them in a (more or less) random order. As I described of the fragments in my post, “that taken together they would make sense but perhaps not too much sense.”
Now as then, the answer to the title of my post is: no. As in the previous post, I present the segments first, with their sources in endnotes:
“The Queen of England was standing in a hall at the London School of Economics looking a little perplexed.” {1}
“The fact is that, despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science.” {2}
“Being ordinary is acknowledging, without thinking about it, that you possess the capacity to meet, gracefully and productively, whatever situation or challenge you find on your plate.” {3}
“A marketable skill is a specific service you provide at the intersection of talents, strengths, and education that a customer or company will pay you for.” {4}
“Dwelling on the past and worrying about the future produces false narratives that drown out the sound of our most authentic voice.” {5}
“Most organizations pay lip service to the importance of mistakes—but few people believe it’s safe to talk about them.” {6}
“Look around among my stories and you will probably find only one or two that actually happened to me.” {7}
“The present relationship between cities and automobiles represents, in short, one of those jokes that history sometimes plays on progress.” {8}
“Insight, the big-picture view of why, what, and how everything fits together, is the holy grail of innovation.” {9}
“Standard social and business practices are built on certain assumptions—shared understandings that have evolved from older beliefs and conditions.” {10}
“The thing about archives is they need to go somewhere where they’ll be preserved and remain accessible to scholars; and they really ought to end up somewhere that makes sense geographically.” {11}
“People who understand high finance are of two kinds: those who have vast fortunes of their own and those who have nothing at all.” {12}
“Shaped by technologies we are only beginning to deploy, the very underpinnings of our society and institutions—from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate—are being reshaped.” {13}
“The paradox of control is simple. The more we try to control life, the less control we have.” {14}
“Gone are the days when most publishers can justify publication of a book solely on the grounds that it “deserves” to be published.” {15}
Sources:
{1} Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect, 2015, pg 107
{2} Darrell Huff, How to Lie With Statistics, 1954, pg 120
{3} Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, Creativity in Business, 1986, pg 178
{4} Jenny Blake, Pivot, 2016, pg 71
{5} Srinivas Rao, An Audience of One, 2018, pg 46
{6} Margaret Heffernan, Beyond Measure, 2015, pg 21
{7} Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing, 1990, pg 64
{8} Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961, pg 343
{9} Cecily Sommers, Think Like a Futurist, 2012 pg 87
{10} Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility, 2000, pg 4
{11} Marilyn Johnson, This Book is Overdue!, 2010, pg 215
{12} C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law, 1957, pg 24
{13} Marina Gorbis, The Nature of the Future, 2013, pg 25
{14} Joan Borysenko, Minding the Mody, Mending the Mind, 1987, pg 29
{15} Susan Rabiner & Alfred Fortunato, Thinking Like Your Editor, 2002, pg 22
I’ve noted above that the poem itself was not composed by artificial intelligence. But can you be sure the rest of this post was not composed by AI?