PoemBot
A new website uses Google’s artificial intelligence to generate short couplets so vague and lowkey nonsensical that they may as well have been your high school friend’s 2008 Facebook status.
The project, Poem Portraits, lets you “donate” a single word that the algorithm then uses to generate a short poem. If you’d like, you can also take a selfie — no word on how Google AI uses it — which the website uses to create a “poem portrait.”
Kicking The Tires
According to the website, the algorithm was trained on 20 million words of poetry from the 1800s, which may be why some of the poems we generated with futuristic-sounded words didn’t quite work out.
The algorithm rejected many of our prompts, including words like “Elon,” “SpaceX,” and “Cryptographically Secure,” perhaps because the poets of the 1800s hadn’t yet begun to ponder modern-day startup jargon.
Like other poem-writing AI tools, the results don’t always make sense. So our futuristic poems aren’t about to dethrone Grimes — sorry, c — as queen of technology rhymes, despite our best efforts.
READ MORE: Google’s poetry algorithm automates teen angst [Engadget]
More on AI-generated text: An AI Took a Road Trip And Wrote a Terrible Novel About It