I Tried to Make a Search Engine Write Me a Poem

The New York Times:

Before I started writing this, I took a creativity test. Many different such tests exist, but I took one of the best-known ones: Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task, which simply requires that you come up with as many applications for a particular object as possible. I picked a paper coffee cup. After 10 minutes (an amount of time I’d arbitrarily chosen), I had 39 uses, from the prosaic (“hold coffee”) to the probably impractical (“poke holes in the bottom and it could be a shower head for a short amount of time before it collapses”).

I did this because I wanted to test the effectiveness of Yossarian, a new search engine that aims to boost creativity. At Fast Company, Rebecca Greenfield quotes its creator J. Paul Neeley: “Google is an incredibly powerful tool, if you know what you’re looking for. But it’s really problematic in creative terms, if you’re trying to generate new ideas.”

…

In his piece on creativity, Mr. Delistraty notes that one study has found a messy desk can make us more creative. He quotes the study’s lead researcher, Kathleen D. Vohs: “Being creative is aided by breaking away from tradition, order, and convention and a disorderly environment seems to help people do just that.” Maybe Yossarian and autocorrect are digital ways of messing up your desk a little bit, of introducing a little disorder.

I tried plugging “I’m hunger” back into Yossarian, but the search engine was down, preventing me from writing an image-based found poem based on the phrase. I’m going to leave the empty coffee cup on my desk for a while, though; maybe I’ll come up with something.

Read the whole story: The New York Times