Creating Creativity: Machine-Generated Poetry (Part 1 of 2)

Since the beginnings of the Industrial Age, machines have not only shown themselves useful in aiding human endeavors, but in many cases taking over tasks that people once performed. This is especially noticeable in manufacturing, but also in such fields as scientific research and exploration. There are also fields in which machines could do the jobs of people but do not—yet. For example, with satellite navigation and vehicle-mounted sensors, things such as public transportation and curbside waste collection could, technically, be fully automated. Yet, these are all applications of science and industry, and this blog is about the arts—specifically, the art of poetry. So, my question is: Could machines (such as the fictional Ginsbot in the picture at left) ever replace human poets?

Artificial intelligence research progresses year by year, and in many ways it has been successful. But true intelligence, as evidenced by our own human experience, involves a degree of creativity, for it is something we all possess, not just the artists among us. Computer programmers realize this—indeed, there is a multidisciplinary field of research called computational creativity, which overlaps with artificial intelligence—and they have already begun trying their hands at creating programs simulating the creative process of the human mind. Poetry is one product of creativity that these programmers have attempted to produce. How close are they to creating artificial poets?

A Google search for “computer-generated poetry” leads almost immediately to the interactive Poetry CreatOR 2, a program created by computer science students at Stanford University. It is simple to use, asking for input in only five fields, or even allowing the user to generate a poem randomly. As an experiment, I used the following data to generate a poem:

Subject: Dagobert II
Subject Synonym: king
Title: Forgotten
Author: Travis King
Gender: male

This is what the program churned out:

“Forgotten”
Travis King

Watching Geraldine Ferraro from the crystalline eyelash.
A rigid man yelled at the sight of Jan Valdez.
Everlasting gergglaks producing through the sky,
Winky, the precise little carpenter smiled with a cherib grin
Vehicles are larger than men, likewise a brain is better than nothing.
"Exchange!" sighs Lucille Ball, the keeper of elephants
My nose seared as Marie Curie strolled by with her schnozzle held high
With doubtful eyebrows and languid resolution I can
What did Dagobert II have in his pinky?

How the computer arrived at these results, I don’t know. The program’s creators give no indication as to how the program works. What I do know is that it seems quite random, and that to be considered poetry, it would have to be classified as Dadaist. But since Dada is inherently nonsensical, adhering to no traditional poetic devices, I’ve never considered it particularly creative myself, so in my opinion the Poetry CreatOR 2 fails as a true artificial poetry generator.

A similar program is the Dada Poetry Generator at the Poem of Quotes website. Specifically billed as a Dadaist program, I did not have high expectations for this particular program when it came to anything aside from nonsense, and I was not disappointed. In fact, I found this particular program even more of a failure than the previous. All it does is ask the user to input a paragraph from an online article and then randomize words from that paragraph. For example, I chose a paragraph from a National Geographic article:

“As separate forces, electricity and magnetism had been familiar for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks, for example, used magnetic rocks called lodestones and noticed that amber (Greek word: elektra), when crackling with static electricity, could attract wheat chaff.”

In return, the program gave me the following “poem”:

been for ancient static electricity,
separate for magnetic and noticed
and familiar used (Greek wheat
magnetism ancient magnetic lodestones when
of The example, with attract
been example, used that when

To some extent, this reminds me of “found poetry,” but I have created some found poetry myself, and I know it is not nearly as random as the Dada program makes it out to be. Because of the completely random nature of the Dada Poetry Generator, I consider it, too, a failure at the attempt to create poetry by means of artificial intelligence. I don’t think we can rely on purely random input to generate meaningful poems.

Is there a better way then to reach the goal? Can we create an artificial poet? Can we truly simulate the creativity of human poets? There does seem to be some progress in this endeavor, a means which does not rely on completely random input as the previous programs do, and I will discuss it in more detail next week in the second half of this article. Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve covered so far.