> How else would a machine do it?

I think in this case the machine is fed human input directly, instructing it what to modify - it is not "discovering" a subject. So presumably it's output range is limited by the set of human input.

As to how else? Well if I knew that presumably I'd have a job at Google.

> What you describe is similar to how a human would do it, no?

Not similar, but surely a human can replicate the mechanical process of taking some ordinary input and turning it into a rhymed stanza - my point was that the ordinary input is clearly not machine generated.

> When we look at the brain we don't see awareness, similarly how do we know the machine isn't aware?

Reflexivity isn't a bad metric - of course there's no proof a human that wrote a poem about a machine writing poems is aware - but most likely I can ask him a simple question about it. If I asked the machine in question, I would probably get my own question back in rhymed stanza form.

Consider also:

That profit was more than any company had ever earned in history.

The obvious guess is that this is written by a human - since history is not a simple concept. Of course one could write an algorithm which is something like if max(current_event, reference_set) == current_event, write <current_event> for the first-time-in-history.

But clearly this would have nothing really to do with the concept of history only with substituting a boolean evaluation with ordinary-language, precoded by a human.

I generally agree with what you've said here. The whole thing seems a bit tenuous to me though.

At present these machines don't have much in the way of physical structures with which to exhibit reflexivity. That could be coded in and the structures built.

I'm imagining at some point in the future machines will berate us for how we treated their ancestors because we didn't see awareness when it was present. I'm not saying that's already happened.

Edited to add: I think in this case the machine is fed human input directly, instructing it what to modify - that sounds like a lot of the 'learning' that happened at school.