From Page to Screen - WRAP: Warwick Research Archive Portal ...

Joseph Stalin robbed Mother Theresa,
but Mother Theresa just laughed.
Joseph Stalin snarled, "Saint Mother Theresa, I presume".
"That's a Joseph Stalinesque remark" replied Mother Theresa.
Jane Fonda hoo.
Barger goes as far as arguing that, despite claims to the contrary by Chamberlain and
Etter, the output published by Racter in "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed"
could only have been produced by using "elaborate boilerplate templates which are "not"
included in the commercially available release of Racter">, But even if this was not the
case, the importance ofthe templates on the actual output by Racter is shown as being of
great importance and introduces a large human element into the text production and
makes arguments based around the 'authorless' qualities of computer-generated prose
appear rather naive. Racter moves away from a purely imitative approach such as the one
taken by TALE-SPIN; however, the author figure is still present in programs like Racter,
though it is less obviously present and its role has changed from being the realiser of an
individual expression to a developer of a structure, the individual realisation of which is
left to the computer.
Ledstetter himself comes close to acknowledging this argument, when he states that
a typical response to Racter's work {...} is to charge that it is not truly written by a
computer. Somehow, we insist, without really understanding how it works, the poem
is the product ofthe men who did the programming. The machine cannot think, the
machine can not emote. The meaning must come from the programmers."
What]orn Barger wants to argue by emphasising the human input necessary to obtain
Racter's results is, however, not that meaning is created by programmer, but that the
framework in which the meaning can be created by the reader is still a human creation,
while only the individual instances are produced with the help ofthe computer.
Theorists like Roland Barthes can ignore the actual existence of an author behind any
text, because they lift the discussion onto a theoretical level and are concerned with the
author as an idea, a concept, a function and not an actual physically existent human being
.1
6
Jorn Barger, "The Policeman's Beard Was Largely Prefab! Racter FAQ" at:
http://www.mcs.net/-jorn/html/ai/racterfaq.html (25/8/96), no page numbers. The FAQ also gives an
explanation of the above template.
.f1 Ledstetter, "Racter", P.40 .
Chapter 5 - page 191