Artificial Intelligence Poetry Fools Humans

Roses are red, violets are blue, algorithms can write poetry, and they’re starting to sound like you!

Well, that’s our best attempt at becoming the next Shakespeare. While we likely won’t ever reach that height of poetic mastery, artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to learn how to.

According to a paper by researchers at Microsoft and professors at Kyoto University, they taught a machine how to create poetry that was thought to be human-written by online human judges. To create a poem, the algorithm had to make associations between images and text. To achieve this, the AI was exposed to thousands of images juxtaposed with human-written descriptions and poems about each image. The final results were pretty amazing:

Where we can go

The sun is singing in the forest rain

And the mist is the sound of the sea

And the soul is the golden sun

And the light of God is gone

The AI’s lyrics are deep and meaningful, transcribing a picture not just literally, but metaphorically:

I am a coal-truck

by a broken heart

I have no sound

the sound of my heart

I am not

Here are some other epic poems written by this algorithm:

This is not the first time AI has been used to mimic human creativity; Google’s algorithm tried its luck at music, while creative agency McCann decided to welcome a robotic employee in its ranks.

Edited 6/4/18