Researchers built an AI capable of writing poetry that's equal parts woeful and impressive

As if the world weren't already full enough of awful human poetry, now the robot overlords want in.

Researchers from Microsoft and Kyoto University were interested in whether they could invent an AI that writes poetry inspired from images, "generating poems to satisfy both relevance to the image and poeticness in language level." Some of the poems produced are pretty objectively abysmal. Others, surprisingly passable.

Here's one inspired by a photo of a dead crab:

"and now i am tired of my own

let me be the freshening blue

haunted through the sky bare

and cold water warm blue air

shimmering brightly never arrives

it seems to say"

And another, whose basis was a photo of a war memorial:

"i have been a great city

spinning and shout

the sound of the road

washed away

the mountain passes through

the streets are gone

the silence is raining

it sits still in silence

glint its own"

And another, this time inspired by a pastoral landscape:

"the sun is shining

the wind moves

naked trees

you dance"

Researchers ran the poetry past actual humans to see if they could spot it was machine generated. Both poetry experts and uncultured swine (like myself) were tested, and it resulted in "competitive confusion to both ordinary annotators and experts." The experts were better at identifying human poetry, although interestingly they benefitted from having the images, whereas ordinary people did better without them.

Mashable spoke to AI-expert Professor Barry O’Sullivan of University College Cork about the significance of such experiments with machine-lyricism.

“Creativity is a hallmark of intelligence," he told us. "The field of computational creativity - how we build systems that are creative - is fascinating and it goes far beyond the simple replication of activities that we consider creative. It tries to also study the nature of creativity itself."

O'Sullivan said that AI systems writing poetry has long been examined, but the focus of the discussion should be on how we measure creativity. "What is art?" he asked, "How do we recognise something that is of artistic value? Who defines what the ground truth that determines whether one poem is more poetic than another?"

"These are questions that strike me as being just as complex as asking what does intelligence mean?" he said. "Until we know the answers there will always be significant limitations to the extent that we can measure progress towards creativity.”

Machines, it seems, have a long way to go before they can be taken seriously on the poetry scene. But then again, so do most human poets.