Skip to Content
Artificial intelligence

AI is a poet, and knows it

April 26, 2018

We’ve written about how AI is going to put radiologists and lawyers out of work, but now it’s coming for poets.

Background: Deep learning has gotten pretty good at generating text descriptions for images. So good, in fact, that researchers decided to take it a step further with a neural network that can create free verse using an image as the source of inspiration.

How it works: To learn how to use an image as its muse, an algorithm was trained on thousands of image/poem pairs. That algorithm was then teamed up with a generative adversarial network (GAN) to look at images and produce poems from scratch.

Results: In a kind of poetry Turing test with over 500 human judges (including 30 English majors who were considered “experts”), AI-created verse was evaluated against poems written by people. Let’s be honest here: the AI “poetry”(see above) reads like something by a particularly angsty teenager. But the English majors were only able to spot the automated poem about 60 percent of the time. The rest of the evaluators weren’t any better than chance at picking out the AI.

Deep Dive

Artificial intelligence

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch

Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.