I haven't written about the torrent of spam word salad for some time, and the reason is that although I get as much as I ever did, it just isn't that interesting any more. You will remember my florid posts on the bizarre names and themes that the word generators came up with, all with the intention of trying to get past the spam filters on my various accounts. None of them did, however, since I fished them all from the "spam holding tanks" that the accounts kept them in, before I deleted them into the electronic sewer.

I used to be entertained by wacky combinations of words used as names, such as "Limburger R. Baronets" or "Fathead U. Stranger." These still come through occasionally, but they are less and less amusing. And the odd ethnic mis-mixture of names seems to have stopped as well, leaving only the more "normal" sounding names that the generators can constantly churn out.

Instead, the generators rely on a mash-up of names, words, and proper names, with extra letters thrown in, and their subject lines sound equally dense: "Svgcentrist volleyball" sends a note titled "Was mitochondria so equine," while "Dydrestitution leggy" titles its note: "The jacqueline till reversal." What am I to make of something sent by "Vgzsalamander centigrade" titled "To between monic" or a note from "Qbcpotato glum" titled "That to churchwomen"? Is it possible that these cybernetic surrealists are exploring the reaches of avant-garde poetry which is beyond our usual concepts of word and sense? Or are they just running out of inspiration?

This brings me to yet another question, which was popular many years ago but seems not to be raised much any more: Can a machine really be creative? Experts in artificial intelligence, back in the 1960's when this was first being developed, assured us that someday soon a machine could write poetry or paint pictures that would be as good as anything a human artist could create. This was not just the random pecking of the proverbial hundred monkeys on the typewriters; there was some sort of algorithm or system which would allow a machine eventually to be artistically creative. A short search on Google (of course) shows that some work is still being done on this subject, both by computer theorists and science fiction writers, but the dream of a truly artistic machine seems to have been put on hold for now.

I remember reading, in my youth, a science fiction story whose name or author I can't remember right now. (Maybe my more knowledgeable readers will recognize it for me.) In the story, the main character receives a mysterious box which, when opened, contains an "art machine." It has a plotter for a drawing tool and can produce drawings that rival Picasso's or Matisse's. The only problem is that the manual for this machine is written in a language which, at least to its ignorant human operator, looks like alien gibberish. The main character makes plenty of money selling the drawings the machine makes, presenting them as the work of a brilliant new artist, until one day the drawings get simpler and simpler, and finally stop. He cannot make the machine do any more drawings, and his "brilliant new artist" is revealed as a fraud. In desperation he takes the manual to a language expert, who reveals to him that the instructions are written in Swedish. And that the machine has worn out from ill-use since he didn't bother to learn how to read the (…) manual.

Is this what has happened with the spam name generators? I never believed that their word salad was quite random. It was just too funny. But now it seems that its surrealistic inventiveness has degenerated into incoherence, or at least non-meaningfulness. I used to find tasty combinations where now it is just a rather jumbled word granola. Has the machine run out of creativity? Was the machine ever creative in the first place? Or was it I who was the imaginative one, making sense out of nonsense because it is my mental nature to do so? The world is full of randomizing influences and degenerating information, which can sometimes end up as a healthful or adaptive mutation, but more often as a mass of goo. Does creativity of any sort, then, depend less on some artist's inspiration and more on the endless combination and re-combination of elements, almost all of which end up in the idea wastebasket? Maybe creativity is in the artistic choice, rather than the machine cranks of semi-random generation.

Posted at 2:52 am | link