Hop over to the Miraculous Agitations blog to behold attempts to create an artificial intelligence ‘local poet’ using text analysis procedures and speech synthesis.  The poet robot is based on a very obscure 1990s rustic poet called Bill Cooper.  Cooper’s oeuvre was fed into a word-combination probability analyser (based around a Markov chain), and new rustic emissions were sought.

These experiments were briefly featured, among other feverishly discussed book-related things, on William English’s Wavelength on Friday 6th June.  The ‘Robot Bill Cooper’ text generator has implications for books in general: in theory you could dump a book’s text into a program and have a new text generated in the author’s style…