In a move that might summon visions of your eighth-grade self feverishly contemplating couplets, a new website is using Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) to generate unique poetry sophisticated enough to rival your middle school ramblings.
Called Poem Portraits, the project requires users to “donate” one word and the algorithm then creates a short poem based on that word. That poem is then overlaid on an optional selfie uploaded by the user.
To create the poetry, the algorithm was trained on over 20 million words from nineteenth century literature, ensuring that the end result is, well, not exactly timely. Consequently, a series of failures have been encountered when modern-day “words” like "bae" have been donated.
After donating the word “avocado,” my poem result was:
“Our avocado heads are spread out of the desert, this halcyon morning sun is ready.”
Although slightly absurd, this prose is still likely less cringe-worthy than anything that might be found in my own middle school journals.
*Accompanying this article is a screenshot of how the poem appears. However, the results were different the second time I entered my donated word. I didn’t use my “avocado head” in time enough to capture a screenshot of the original prose.
Source: Poem Portraits
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