Google's AI Writes Poetry After Reading Thousands of Romance Novels

Posted on May 19, 2016

Google has been developing an artificial intelligence with researchers at Stanford and the University of Massachusetts. The researchers have been feeding this neural network romance novels in an attempt to make it more conversational.

Andrew Dai, a software engineer at Google who is one of the project leaders, told BuzzFeed, "In the Google app, the responses are very factual. Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register."

The researchers decided the Google recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM) was ready to try writing on its own after being trained with the romance novels. The researchers gave RNNLM a beginning and ending sentence and let it fill in the rest. This resulted in work that resembles poetry or very short stories. The researchers call them homotopies.

The researchers note in a research report that "Because the model is trained on fiction, including romance novels, the topics are often rather dramatic."

The AI's writing is very dramatic indeed and involves crying and murderous thoughts. The Guardian is not impressed with the Google AI's poems and says some of it would "make the fictional Vogons proud."

Here are a couple of the Google AI's poems. The sentences in bold are the sentences given to the AI by the researchers.

there is no one else in the world.
there is no one else in sight.
they were the only ones who mattered.
they were the only ones left.
he had to be with me.
she had to be with him.
i had to do this.
i wanted to kill him.
i started to cry.
i turned to him.
this was the only way.
it was the only way.
it was her turn to blink.
it was hard to tell.
it was time to move on.
he had to do it again.
they all looked at each other.
they all turned to look back.
they both turned to face him.
they both turned and walked away.

i dont like it , he said.
i waited for what had happened.
it was almost thirty years ago.
it was over thirty years ago.
that was six years ago.
he had died two years ago.
ten , thirty years ago.
“ it 's all right here.
“ everything is all right here.
“ it 's all right here.
it 's all right here.
we are all right here.
come here in five minutes.



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