For computer graphics, I have a standard that I use where instead of asking "Is this rendering technology 'realistic'?", as in, a binary question, I ask "At what resolution is this render indistinguishable from reality?" For instance, there's a lot of car photos and architecture renderings that use that use certain expensive rendering techniques that look <i>great</i> even at 720p, but you start getting into 1080p or above and it once again becomes clear it's a computer rendering. Other techniques may only be able to work up to 320x200 or something.<p>Similarly, telling whether a computer has written something or not is very challenging at this snippet size because there's hardly any room for "voice" to shine through. I actually did pretty well, but to be honest I got more mileage out of a meta-heuristic ("how is the author trying to fool me? ah, this one seems really, <i>really</i> human so it must be computer... yup...") than actual analysis of the text. I mean, drop those computer-generated sports sentences into the middle of a human sports column and you're not going to pick them out specially... they're facts. They fit. However, an entire column written like can be pretty obvious. I get some financial news from some Google Alerts on a couple of companies and it's incredibly obvious that there are computer algorithms out there that can take the daily outcome for a stock, how the market did that day, and how the entire industry did that day, and spin that into several hundred words of completely and utterly <i>useless</i> speculation about "why" the stock did a certain thing. (Not that it hasn't become clear to me just how shallow a lot of the "free" analysis is, but, well, in no way does outsourcing the shallow analysis job to a computer make it any better...!)<p>(One of them in particular that I've come to enjoy reading in an almost Dadaist sort of way really loves the phrase "The bears had a field day with..." as in, "The bears had a field day with $STOCK as it dropped 0.01% in light trading.")<p>Increase the sample size and you'd probably get a better sense of whether or not it is fooling you. I was going to write "and you might do better", but that's not necessarily true... for instance, to be honest I've never been "into" poetry, I've even tried seriously a couple of times, just can't do it, and I'm pretty sure the poetry-writing program could fool me for quite a few stanzas before I eventually caught on because, to me, it's all the same. [1] I'd eventually guess more on meta-analysis like observing grammatical structures being repeated for what would not be a good reason.<p>[1]: Have I caveated this sufficiently that nobody will feel compelled to reply and explain to me just how objectively awesome poetry is? I'd say my thing is more music, but to be honest, a surprising number of "human" composers already sound pretty computer-y to me....