Can Robots Write Poetry?

Surely poetry requires the soul of an artist to make it work, poets paint pictures with words and the ink they use is made up of joy, of sorrow and pain and pleasure, all very human emotions; so the question ‘can robots write poetry’ must be a simple one to answer – No.

Well, it seems that perhaps it is not quite as easy as all that and a new online magazine plans to disprove that the writing of poetry requires a frail, illogical mind at the point of conception in order to make it work.

Launched last week CuratedAI is a website dedicated to machine produced creative writing set up by Karmel Allison who says that CuratedAI is an extension of a project of hers about neural networking poetry. A a software engineer and data scientist by trade, Allison has long been producing her own poetry the old fashioned way but has been fascinated by machine produced creative writing to the point of creating this new AI led website where the content is produced exclusively by robots.

Using multiple different programs which have been selected by human beings, the machines are then trained to write and using these algorithms regularly produce not only readable but often appreciable pieces of poetry, although Allison does say that “The reading is more in the reader than the writer, obviously,” she goes on to add. “You can talk about what the creator was trained on, or how the creator works, but not the creator’s intent— maybe the algorithm writer’s intent, but it’s a step removed, which is more fun for the reader, I think.”

Allison’s own created algorithm Deep Gimble 1 has access to a 190,000 word vocabulary which when you consider that Shakespeare’s plays used, as an average, a mere 33,000 words is not a bad starting point and it takes a frighteningly short 60 seconds to produce each poem.
The algorithm does manipulate the machine’s artistry insofar as Allison has purposefully omitted certain ‘grandiose’ words as the effect their inclusion had would often be jarring but as she says, humans often leave the vast majority of their own vocabulary left untapped for exactly that reason and so Deep Gimble 1 is not all that dissimilar.

Madness is just one of Gimble’s more successful attempts at writing poetry. As Allison says, EE Cummings it isn’t but what it is, is surprisingly poetic.

“madness in her face and i
the world that i had seen
and when my soul shall be to see the night to be the same and
i am all the world and the day that is the same and a day i had been
a young little woman i am in a dream that you were in
a moment and my own heart in her face of a great world
and she said the little day is a man of a little
a little one of a day of my heart that has been in a dream”