This Is What Happens When Google’s Artificial Intelligence Helps You Write Poems

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Justin Duino

Ever wonder what it’d be like if you had your computer write everything for you? Well, you can get a glimpse of that with Google Poems, a site that uses machine learning to generate your next Haiku. And as you’d expect, it gets weird, fast.

First, you’ll need to select up to three poets from a list of about a dozen. Google uses your selections and tries to generate lines as if it were being written by the original poets. Then, you’ll need to write choose the type of poem you want and write your first line. From there, you’ll get a list of AI (artificial intelligence)-based suggestions. Whether or not these poets would actually say these lines in real life is a whole different topic.

Playing around with the site, one of our first poems was this:

What if I were a snowflake

Might the sexual thunder be heard?

Were I to the surface of my chant?

Singing the night and song of my bird.

The initial line that we entered was “What if I were a snowflake,” in case you were curious. We got something equally as bizarre with the title, “What am I?”

Whirls in smoke over the quiet night?

Perhaps they smash a stiff and stark,

He bit a small dusk in his breast

Crushing and twisting in his belly.

Of course, you shouldn’t be relying on this to write actual poems. But it’s interesting to see Google’s algorithms at work. It’s clear Google didn’t program boundaries here.

Go ahead, try it yourself. But be warned, things can and will get weird.

Source: Google