There’s been quite a few articles about Google’s poetry algorithm, available here. The project, Poem Portraits by Es Devlin, uses “An algorithm trained on over 20 million words of 19th century poetry” to generate a “unique POEMPORTRAIT.”

The word I “donated” to the system was “modern.” Although the system asks for access to your camera so that it take an image of you to blend with the text it generates, I rebelliously pressed “Skip.” Futurism and Engadget have examples of Poem Portraits with pictures if you’d like to see them. Also, the system wouldn’t work on my laptop so I used my smartphone instead.

Here’s what the algorithm outputted:

I mean, the general style and tone reminds me of 19th century Romantic poetry, albeit without the rhyme. So I decided to “donate” the word “modern” again:

I mean, there’s alliteration here, but the second line reminds me of a postmodern teenager experimenting with poetry.

Clearly, the algorithm isn’t very good at generating poetry. So bored but unsurprising, I clicked on the “Collective Poem” option.

I suppose this isn’t so bad, especially compared to what happens when I scrolled down:

The anemone of the East, whose glory,

Your banana roses are on the shores of the wind.

Portait Poems by Es Devlin

How could I not laugh at the poetic genius of these lines? Maybe I shouldn’t laugh, because when the machines rise up, I’m sure they’ll find this source to prove how I once mocked them.

Then again, let’s not forget that less than a hundred years ago, cars and aircraft were extremely rare, space travel didn’t exist, nor did computers or the internet. It’s only been 13 years since Apple started the smartphone trend, meaning the iPhone only recently became a teenager. So, shh, don’t tell the machines I laughed at them, tell them I said how good they were given the fact they were just infants at the time.