Awards Announced for 2017 Turing Tests in the Creative Arts

June 20, 2017

The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College has announced the winners of the 2017 "Turing Tests in the Creative Arts."

The awards were revealed today at the Music Metacreation Workshop (MuMe), part of the International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), in Atlanta.

The contest, celebrating its second year, challenges judges to rate poetry, literature, music and dance created by machines against works created by humans. Awards are given to the artificial intelligence creations that are the most indistinguishable from human work.

2017 Turing Tests in the Creative Arts Winners:

PoetiX: Machine-generated sonnet indistinguishable from human poetry:
Charese Smiley and Hiroko Bretz,Thomson Reuters Research
and Development, MN, USA.
First-place entry viewable at: http://bregman.dartmouth.edu/turingtests/2017Winners

AccompaniX: Machine-generated music accompaniment indistinguishable from a human composition:
Christopher Raphael, School of Informatics and Computer Science, Indiana University.
First-place entry viewable at: http://bregman.dartmouth.edu/turingtests/2017Winners

DanceX: Machine-generated dance accompaniment indistinguishable from a human partner:
Single-entrant prize awarded to ADAM Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology.
First-place entry viewable at: http://bregman.dartmouth.edu/turingtests/2017Winners

DigiLit: Machine-generated short story indistinguishable from a human story No entrants due to category difficulty.

"Human-machine collaboration was a new theme in this year's challenge," said Dan Rockmore, Dartmouth College's William H. Neukom 1964 Professor of Computational Science. "The results of this year's Turing Tests move us away from the debate around humans versus machines, and move us toward the more optimistic setting of investigating the ways in which machines and humans can work together."

To pass the Turing Test, an entry must convince the majority of judges that machine-generated content was created by a human. The "Music Plus One" submission in the AccompaniX category was the only winning entry that achieved this standard. "We were very excited that the winning AccompaniX entry effectively passed a Turing Test for musical accompaniment," Rockmore added.

Award money totaling $5000 was shared by first-prize winners and other entrants in each category. More details on the event can be found on the following website: http://bregman.dartmouth.edu/turingtests/