Aritificial Poetry
Don’t Want Last
By Jack Easley and Apple predictive keyboard
Gray and white-
have been the most important part about
this evening.
You can do that and if we don’t
Want you
We can talk about it.
I hope you have the same day as well.
You
Are so sweet to love
You are the only thing you need help
But thank the person
For you.
Gray and white-
You can come
And see.
You arrived here for the last night
Of your family planning.
One of the most games I’ve had
Is the game.
If I had the time and inclination to write a computer program that generated poetry, I would probably follow the steps used by many literature-generation AIs. I would first create a framework with which the program could distinguish different word types (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) and process them. I would then feed the program as many poems I could get my hands on. This is somewhat how predictive keyboards work. The smarter ones take the words that you type, and remembers the other words you commonly type them in combination with. This way, the program can guess at what word you will type next based on what you have historically done in similar situations
Because of this, I decided to use the built-in predictive keyboard on the iphone to generate a poem. I started out with a word that I randomly picked from a random word generator online. The word was "gray." I then repeatedly picked out the next words out of the three given options. I wanted to create the kind of disjoint that I would expect to see in an AI written poem. The line spacing, the word choices, the combination of nouns, verbs and what order they come in all make sense, and mimic many free-verse poems. There are even little "dramatic pauses" created by the spacing of lines and punctuation. The words all seem like logical choices of words to follow the previous ones, too. However, when you take all of the words together, they really make no sense. After all, how is a computer program supposed to be able to derive meaning from words? All it can do is put them in the right order, and make sure that it is grammatically correct, and coherent. The program doesn't "know" what it's writing. It just knows how to write.
The title was three randomly selected words from the poem's body. I think that it does somewhat mimic what a computer program designed to create poems would spit out. It knows how to put the words together, but it has no idea what the words it's putting together mean.
I immediately recognized the iPhone AI predictive text when I first started reading this poem. It's really cool though, and it actually turned out to make an interesting poem. It even seems to have a theme, although it's vague in the way iPhone's AI is meant to be. I really like the 4th to last and the 3rd to last lines. I'm not sure how the last two lines fit in, but they're definitely a twist.
ReplyDeleteI loved this post! The way you created the poem was very creative and tied in really nicely with your paragraphs below. I found it interesting how the poem did sound like an actual poem. I also think that you summed it up very nicely when you said, "The program doesn't 'know' what it's writing. It just knows how to write". I think that that is a really good way of putting it and explaining why it sounds like a poem but doesn't have a real meaning. Great post!
ReplyDeleteThis is really intriguing. The idea that word-by-word you can see the progression, but as a whole there is no logical "flow" is one that really stuck with me. I wonder though, is meaning essential to a poem? In other words can something be a poem with no meaning behind it? Perhaps the first poem by AI would be one with meaning. Or perhaps even this poem you've created has its own meaning.
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea behind this post, and it really makes you think about the difference between humans and A.I. at this point in technology; we are able to see the big picture and piece meanings together, but the predictive keyboard can only use nearby words or sentences to predict the next word. It's also interesting that this predictive piece could be considered poetry, which speaks to how broadly or ambiguously poetry is defined.
ReplyDeleteWow. This is creative. I love the Apple predictive keyboard. It makes my life easier sometimes. It always amused me on how Apple does this. It's incredible that they can give you a list of word(s) that is relevant to the current phrase you were writing just now. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI like the idea that the first poem created by an AI will be based off what the AI predicts a human will say. I thought it was cool that you used an apple keyboard to create your poem. It shows how some lines can be stand alone lines, but there is no clear meaning to the poem. Nice Job!
ReplyDeleteFor a poem that was written using a iPhones predictive text, I feel like it was relatively good. I like your idea on programming an AI to make poetry. You should think about making a discord bot, it could join my poetry discord server! Aside from my shameless self plug, this was a nice post that I spent way too long trying to interpet the meaning behind the poem (random generated words and stuff). The poem itself was formatted really well, with the use of your dramtic spaces. Good job!
ReplyDeleteThis is a really great idea! It's clever and shows the limits of AI - if the predictive keyboard is controlled by something like AI (is it? I don't know anything about computers). Either way, I really enjoyed this post, and I think it exposes how frustrating it could get if we turn over poem writing to our computer overlords.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a creative interpretation of the prompt! Your decision to use the Apple predictive keyboard I think was very apt, and mirrors quite well what kind of poem an AI might write. I also just really enjoyed the poem itself. The last two lines made me laugh a lot, especially with the "dramatic pause", as you called it, made by the spacing.
ReplyDeleteI think that this poem was really neat. To me, at least, I could sort of imagine that a human wrote the entire thing. That might be a success of the AI for the predictive keyboard, I guess. I really like the last two lines, as well - they made me chuckle. I also like that you wrote about how you tried to make the computer do as much of the work as possible.
ReplyDeleteI very much enjoyed reading this poem. It is quite fascinating to see how the sentences are close to intelligible, but still disjoint enough that the poem has a wonderful sense of ambiguity to it. It almost feels as though the poem is in a foreign language that you sort of know, but not well enough to catch all the words.
ReplyDeleteJack this is gorgeous! I really like the idea of using the tools at hand to write poetry. It reminds me of what artists like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy do in art. Moholy Nagy made these paintings by ordering them via phone (he split the canvas up into coordinates and told the manufacturer what to do). In this case, did Moholy-Nagy make his his own paintings or did the manufacturer? Did you write this poem or did your phone?
ReplyDelete