The sun is shining
The wind moves
Naked trees
You dance
The poem above was written by a robot. The kicker is not that a robot created the poem but that it was constructed based on the image!
That’s right. Auto-generated poetry based on an image.
It’s one of the latest discoveries to come out of Microsoft Research Asia where a pair of Microsoft researches teamed up with a pair of professors at Kyoto University to discover the ‘poet in the machine’
The team:
took an imaginative approach to the quest of generating poetic language in response to images for automatic poetry creation, opening new possibilities for augmenting human endeavor. The project involved multiple challenges, including discovering poetic clues from images, as well as generating poems that would satisfy both relevance to an image and — something difficult to define but not disputed to exist — poeticness, to use the term coined by the researchers.
Their goal isn’t to replace poets, it’s about the myriad applications that can augment creative activity and achievement that the existence of even mildly creative AI could represent.”
The team will be sharing it’s findings at an upcoming multimedia conference in Seoul.
What are they working on next? Storytelling, where the machine generates a story from multiple images — they call it visual storytelling.
More for the Microsoft Research blog: The poet in the machine: Auto-generation of poetry directly from images through multi-adversarial training – and a little inspiration
h/t Irish Times