Give me some time and I can make it rhyme
The computer scientists are on a mission to make humans obsolete. Not only do we have cameras which compose their own pictures, and computers which synthesise their own music, we now have machine-generated verse.
Microsoft has a Chinese chatbot called Xiaoice (pronounce it "shao ice") which has turned its hand to poetry, and has now had a book of 139 of its poems published in China under the title "The Sunlight That Lost The Glass Window". According to the paper published by researchers, the software is given an image and creates keywords representing objects and sentiments perceived from the image. These keywords are then expanded to related ones based on their associations in human written poems. Finally, verses are generated from the keywords using an AI system trained on existing poems. The result is pieces such as this:
The rain is blowing through the sea
A bird in the sky
A night of light and calm
Sunlight
Now in the sky
Cool heart
The savage north wind
When I found a new world
or this:
Wings hold rocks and water tightly
In the loneliness
Stroll the empty
The land becomes soft
We have to give some leeway in our judgement because the poetry was written in Chinese, not English, and perhaps in the original language it is more powerful, but this type of poem seems to be little more than random collections of words, and it has no emotion. This view is reinforced when you consider that the 139 poems featured in the book were cherry-picked from the 12 million poems that Xiaoice has composed so far. Monkeys and typewriters spring to mind.
Computer-generated verse is just a collection of words which are arranged in way which is statistically similar to human poetry. But even if it could mimic thinking humans and use cold logic to generate realistic sounding poems which deceive us into thinking they were constructed by second rate poets,... what is the point?
Human poetry is original, inspiring, and takes unexpected twists and turns. For an example of contemporary human poetry, take a look at The Bard of Salford, John Cooper Clarke. Forty years ago his northern drawl was set to a backing track of electric guitars and was a hit with the audiences of cult programmes such as The John Peel Show, and The Old Grey Whistle Test. This piece, Reader's Wives, harks back to a more innocent time before the internet. Warning. Content may offend the easily offended.
30th August 2018
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.