As if the world weren't already full enough of awful human poetry, now the robot overlords want in.
SEE ALSO: This cake-making robot puts your other household robots to shameResearchers from Microsoft and Kyoto University were interested in whether they could invent an AI that writes poetry inspired from images, "generating poems to satisfy both relevance to the image and poeticness in language level." Some of the poems produced are pretty objectively abysmal. Others, surprisingly passable.
Here's one inspired by a photo of a dead crab:
"and now i am tired of my own
let me be the freshening blue
haunted through the sky bare
and cold water warm blue air
shimmering brightly never arrives
it seems to say"
And another, whose basis was a photo of a war memorial:
"i have been a great city
spinning and shout
the sound of the road
washed away
the mountain passes through
the streets are gone
the silence is raining
it sits still in silence
glint its own"
And another, this time inspired by a pastoral landscape:
"the sun is shining
the wind moves
naked trees
you dance"
Researchers ran the poetry past actual humans to see if they could spot it was machine generated. Both poetry experts and uncultured swine (like myself) were tested, and it resulted in "competitive confusion to both ordinary annotators and experts." The experts were better at identifying human poetry, although interestingly they benefitted from having the images, whereas ordinary people did better without them.
Mashablespoke to AI-expert Professor Barry O’Sullivan of University College Cork about the significance of such experiments with machine-lyricism.
“Creativity is a hallmark of intelligence"
“Creativity is a hallmark of intelligence," he told us. "The field of computational creativity - how we build systems that are creative - is fascinating and it goes far beyond the simple replication of activities that we consider creative. It tries to also study the nature of creativity itself."
O'Sullivan said that AI systems writing poetry has long been examined, but the focus of the discussion should be on how we measure creativity. "What is art?" he asked, "How do we recognise something that is of artistic value? Who defines what the ground truth that determines whether one poem is more poetic than another?"
"These are questions that strike me as being just as complex as asking what does intelligence mean?" he said. "Until we know the answers there will always be significant limitations to the extent that we can measure progress towards creativity.”
Machines, it seems, have a long way to go before they can be taken seriously on the poetry scene. But then again, so do most human poets.
Featured Video For You
Legoland Japan broke a world record with their cherry blossom tree made out of Legos