minimally trained on public domain poetry

July 29, 2016 1:23 PM

CuratedAI is a literary magazine where the poems and stories are written entirely by machines. For example, there is He Lived with Regret ("He lived with regret at his own table– for his own sake have mercy upon him...") by Tolstoyish, a Recurrent Neural Net trained on the work of Leo Tolstoy. Or Defunct ("defunct and master my god is dead with my love/and the man that i give him") by Deep Gimble I, which is minimally trained on public domain poetry and seeded with a single word.
posted by blahblahblah (13 comments total)

MetaFilter: minimally trained on public domain poetry
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:02 PM on July 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Huh. That poem is…modern in style and structure. I wouldn't know it's an AI if I hadn't been told.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:07 PM on July 29, 2016

Call those the random outpourings of a machine that has no sense of rhythm, sense or beauty? Pah! A free verse poet could have written them.
posted by howfar at 2:21 PM on July 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

There is, of course, some wonderful free verse. It's just very, very, very hard to write.
posted by howfar at 2:21 PM on July 29, 2016

The best part is the "contributor asks for payment, the editor sends excuses" cycle can now iterate in milliseconds!
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:51 PM on July 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

One hopes somebody has pointed the Internet Archive bots at the site so it'll be remembered.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:52 PM on July 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I wonder how many poems about Sonic the Hedgehog they had to throw out before they came up with these.

"Obama chuckled/'You mean the Chaos Emeralds?'"
posted by JHarris at 5:50 PM on July 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Poetry, just form or form of expression? I say the latter and this article sounds like pure dada to me.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:40 AM on July 30, 2016

Celsius1414: One hopes somebody has pointed the Internet Archive bots at the site so it'll be remembered.

Done!
posted by Kattullus at 11:40 AM on July 30, 2016

Poetry, just form or form of expression? I say the latter and this article sounds like pure dada to me.

There's no form, either. It's all free verse. Train it to write a sonnet, no matter how nonsensical, and you've achieved something interesting, I think. I mean, programming a computer to write a nonsense sonnet would be fairly trivial, but training a neural network in the form would be interesting.
posted by howfar at 2:59 PM on July 30, 2016

I have submitted to a machine-learnkng écervelée the pens that you were jeepers on the server and whichever you provably hopping to appreciate non Irvington
Coprocessor me they were félicités so sure and si cold
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:07 PM on July 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ah, Bach knew Telemann. A German time domain reflectometrist of the 18th century liked lettuce. Bach once ate lettuce with Telemann, and this Baroque time domain reflectometrist also desired lettuce. Lettuce sipped with seltzer. Bach liked wine, do you?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:15 AM on August 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

There are also a lot of hidden verses in so-called prose. For instance,

> There is, of course, some wonderful free verse.

Is a iambic pentamter. Was it deliberate, howfar?
posted by kandinski at 6:11 PM on August 7, 2016