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.
Poetry offers readers an alternate and unique way of viewing the world. The oldest recorded documents were written in poetic form, and the oldest known literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem. Enheduanna, a priestess born over 4,200 years ago, was the world’s first poet and author, but one of the first writers.
In contrast, AI is the newest writer and source of information, so I thought it would be interesting to see what AI “thinks” and what perspective it has of poetry.
AI VS ML
Strictly speaking, this post discusses a machine learning (ML) model, which is still artificial intelligence (AI) but with a subtle a difference. And you probably wouldn’t take notice of the title if it said ML, but maybe I’m just too pedantic. According to Forbes:
ML is an application of AI that says machines should be given data and “learn for themselves”
In that sense, the ML app that I tested has to learn about poetry from a seemingly endless array of data.
Defining Poetry
Poetry has been notoriously difficult to define. It’s so hard to define that the Encyclopædia Britannica that usually gets straight to the point says:
The present article means only to describe in as general a way as possible certain properties of poetry and of poetic thought regarded as in some sense independent modes of the mind.
…
This article considers the difficulty or impossibility of defining poetry;
Talk to Transformer is based on OpenAI’s GPT-2 transformer-based language model, a powerful machine learning model that can generate text. Talk to Transfomer is a neural network capable or recognize patterns in a loosely similar way to how the human brain interprets data, meaning the network learns to perform tasks rather than requiring pre-programming to perform that task.
Poetry
So I entered poetry into the input on the Talk to Transformer website and received the following back:
We are a group of people who have a passion for poetry. We are looking for poets who are also passionate about music, art, and culture. We have a variety of opportunities for all types of poets.
That’s still connected to poetry, but the output is somewhat vague. Then again, if you asked most humans what poetry is, I don’t imagine much less of an ambiguous answer.
Some output doesn’t work that well, and the system outputs words connected to poetry:
But the system does detect anything related to poetry:
The poems I’ll be putting in the mix are a bit older and less frequently revised than the stories. That is my intention, but the older pieces tend to be more poetic, more personal in a way. I like that.
I’ve been doing a lot of self-publishing on my site recently. If you want a book with a picture, here you go!
I’m also doing a lot of work with the folks at Erotic Artisans for their poetry anthologies. Those books are awesome, and I’m glad to help out.
“Poetry,” we are told, is “a piece of music.” We have to “enlist” to be able to play “poetry.” And then “poetry” turns out to be the music that makes the “enlistment” possible.
A good poet will be a great musician. The best musicalists are poets. It is a well-known fact that the greatest writers of all time wrote their best music. They wrote their best poetry.
Is that a bad thing? Or is that an important part of the creative process?
That is the best and most famous part of the creative process, that the greatest writers wrote their best poetry. I know this is true because they were writing at the same time as they were writing their best music. It was not like they had a moment where they went to the piano and started playing. They were writing, writing, writing,
Who is it for? I’d like to take a moment to talk about one of my favorite poetry and prose books: David Foster Wallace’s On Writing. Wallace, whose books include Infinite Jest, The Pale King, and The Broom of the System, is known for his witty, incisive prose style, and his knack for capturing the complexities of people’s lives. Wallace’s poetry is even better. It’s often short, funny, and self-deprecating. It’s full of little parables, observations, and quotes from philosophers, artists, and musicians. It’s funny and beautiful and poignant, and it has a sense of humour that will melt your heart and melt your brain. In his work, Wallace reveals the secrets of the human heart and our brains: how we deal with the loss of loved ones, how we feel about things that make us feel bad, and why we choose to write at all.
I Googled that paragraph and each line separately. However, I could not find any of it anywhere online. Of course the AI generated the text, so I didn’t expect any different of an outcome. But to whom does the I refer: a writer the AI based its text on or the AI itself? I guess the AI’s persona is as ambiguous as much of the modernist and postmodernist poetry or even poetry from before that. Is the “I” the speaker, the poet, a mix of the two, or something else?
Poetry is…
I thought of a different approach, as Talk to Transformer is a text generator that uses prompts. So I prompted it to generate text based on the phrase, “Poetry is.”
I found Talk to Transformer an interesting option for trying to understanding more about poetry. It has much to learn, so it’d be interesting to see what kind of text about poetry it generates in future.
The more I think about Baudelaire’s descriptions of modernity at the time he wrote in the 19th century, the more I realize how similar the world is today. Just look at the picture above, which reveals a juxtaposition we almost never think about. There is a clear distinction between new and old in this image. The smartphone signifies the present, the new, and all its possibilities for instant and endless types of communication from creation to dissemination and back. The pen and notebook, however, are limiting, quite literally. New and old thus have different benefits and disadvantages depending on how we view them.
If the pen runs out of ink then the communication possibilities end with it. Should the pages be filled with ideas then the communication once again ends. Distributing the information on those pages can never be instant, editing them impossible without messy crossings out or obvious correction fluid that invalidates any trust that the words were written by their alleged author. These issues do not exist with the new, in which information can easily be edited and distributed instantly, with questions of authenticity less of an issue. However, in 2019, the source is increasingly likely to have been hacked, the writing could be satire, or the writer could claim to be someone else either as a joke or for more sinister means. Also, I find I am better able to express my thoughts by writing with a pen and paper than I am with typing on a physical or touchscreen keyboard.
Baudelaire questioned what all the changes intended to modernize Paris might mean, whether good or bad, just as keyboards and displays have benefits and disadvantages over pen and paper. The city also revealed a juxtaposition between new and old, as new constructions overshadowed old ones or vice versa depending on one’s philosophical viewpoint.
A few days ago, one of my classmates mocked me, jokingly, by calling me an old man. You see, I’m 31 years old while she’s still a teenager, a median age for almost all of my classmates in any course. I agreed and said to her that when I graduated high school in 2006 the iPhone was a year away from its first announcement by Steve Jobs. That basically means smartphones had yet to have hit the mainstream, and the closest concept was the Blackberry that few people remember today and the younger generations mostly have never even heard existed. Those without smartphones were still using what we now call dumbphones.
In high school, I was still using dial-up internet, though that was in Zimbabwe. More developed countries in Europe and North America were mostly using DSL, ADSL, or VDSL, as fiber optic had yet to hit become the main connection.
I recall the pilot episode of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory from September 24, 2007 in which Leonard and Sheldon attempt to sell their sperm for money so they can purchase “fractional T1 bandwidth” to get “faster downloads.” T1 maxes out at a theoretical 1.544 Mbps for uploads and 1.544 Mbps for downloads, which by today’s standards is nothing. For direct comparison, according to the Speedtest Global Index, the average fixed internet speed worlwide in 2019 is almost 64 Mbps for downloads (over 41 times more than T1) and over 33 Mbps for uploads (almost 22 times more than T1). Not only that, but the prices are much lower than they were in 2007. On a side note, The Big Bang Theory concluded in 2019 despite it being one of the most successful sitcoms ever, perhaps proving the cliche that “all good things must come to an end.”
On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to anyone aged 13 or over worldwide. It took almost two years more for it to reach 100 million users in 2008. As of June 2019, Facebook claims it has over 2.4 billion active users, over 24 times what it had about 9 years earlier.
Content creation and social media were yet to have reached any kind of widespread usage and potential when I graduated from high school. In 2006, YouTube was still largely unknown, as it only launched in 2005, as did Reddit. Twitter launched in 2006, but popular sites like Instagram and Snapchat were yet to have been created. The official launch of WordPress was in 2004, only two years before I graduated. Journalism was still thriving. Fake news meant April Fool’s jokes on the front pages of newspapers.
When I graduated from high school, the infamous Windows Vista hadn’t even launched yet, meaning Windows XP was still the most used operating system. Android and iOS were nowhere to be found. Apple only began transitioning from PowerPC (largely unknown today) to Intel processors in 2006. Most Macs were white and plastic, not metal as they have been for a few years now.
You may be questioning what this has to do with anything? What has it got to do with Baudelaire’s views on modernity at arguably a more drastic change from past to present? He experienced a shift from non-industrialized to industrialization. What I mentioned is all part of industrialization.
My point in mentioning all these differences is to show how quickly the world is changing today. Yes, modernization brought a shock to 19th century Europe, especially as people’s ways of thinking were still limited. The concept of conceptualization was still new, underdeveloped or, for some, non-existent.
Today, the idea of concepts is normal to most. What one must realize is that the changes I mentioned revolving around the time I graduated in 2006 till now is a period of only 13 years. Drastic changes happened without us realizing, that due to their personal aspects are perhaps greater than that in Baudelaire’s time. The devices we use, our access to seemingly endless amounts of information, have changed us.
While in Baudelaire’s time, the non-nobility started to become successful, the opportunity to thrive today through the internet via platforms like blogging and vlogging, or creating apps, means almost anyone can succeed. Indeed, many billionaires derived their wealth from internet and computer-related technologies like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Many YouTubers do not even have degrees, where in the near-past that was largely a pre-requisite for making the hundreds of thousands and millions many do today. To gain a following as large as theirs would require even greater success, usually in the field of book publishing or journalism where authors would engage with the same amounts of followers or even less through their published writing.
Some of the recent past has come full circle with revival of the old into something new. For instance, 2019 sees the release of remakes of the Lion King and Aladdin using computer-generated photo-imagery rather than animation, and in more detail than ever with better sound, lighting, and so on. Rockstar Games set its popular 2013 Grand Theft Auto V game in the fictitious but satirical U.S. state of San Andreas, a location it last used in 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, largely due to its popularity. Before such a period, popular opinion did not often drive content creation. Popular dumbphones like the Nokia 3310 have been revived too.
With successes in re-inventing the past, some failures arrived too. Boeing attempted to develop its 737 MAX by refreshing and modernizing its decades old 737 design. Unfortunately, the result was an absolute disaster, which is one of the reasons many died in resultant plane crashes. The 737 MAX has been grounded since March 2019, almost six months ago, as Boeing tries to correct the issues. But its reputation and financials have been drastically hit by its failures, failures that are on show for all to see thanks to our easy access to information.
Baudelaire also questioned whether modernity was good or bad, as he did in “The Eyes of The Poor,” though a better term would be perhaps be observed rather than questioned. In that poem, Baudelaire describes a newly built café using elements of antiquity like paintings to attract customers, essentially reducing respected art-forms into advertising. Today, marketing itself is being revived back toward creativity and art, with storytelling becoming the popular form for promoting brands and personalities.
Therefore, as Baudelaire shows in “The Eyes of The Poor,” this blend of new and old is neither good nor bad. It is our reaction to it that makes it so. The woman in the poem shows contempt toward the poor, which offends the speaker who does not show contempt but does not show much empathy either (he says he was only “a little ashamed”). Today, this divide between rich and grows wider.
I graduated from high school less than 13 years ago, and will graduate from university a little over 13 years later than that. Once again, many unexpected changes have entered our world without us fully comprehending what they mean. AI and machine learning are becoming the norm, for instance, as is the interconnected automation. Space travel as a form of tourism might soon be a thing too.
An increasing number of smartphones come with AI chips, and those that don’t have Google Voice and Apple Siri, machines as personal assistants. Along with robots like Sophia, those services reveal how human-machine interaction is soon going to be the norm.
Those same services mean George Orwell’s 1984 is becoming less satirical every day with government and corporatemass surveillance intruding into all aspects of our lives, even from countries with which we have no affiliations. In fact, this surveillance has been normalized, and evidence suggests it, alongside further issues like fake news, helped Trump gain offices.
Electric cars like Tesla’s are becoming the norm. Hoverboards are no longer science fiction out of the movies. Motion capture in film is increasing in popularity, like that used in the 2019 movie, Alita: Battle Angel, as a better alternative to CGI. Full-scale automation of jobs is becoming normal, as packing and retrieving products from shelves like Amazon’s Robots prove:
As suggested in the video, perhaps doomsday-focused entertainment like The Terminator franchise masks us from realizing more realistic and concerning technological dangers facing us today.
Social media, content created by everyday individuals or non-traditional journalists, has surpassed traditional journalism and publishing. Citizen journalism shows how traditional journalism has been left behind too. Fake news overrides all of them, unfortunately. The Big Bang Theory may have ended but its available instantly from legitimate streaming services like CBS, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube, either free or paid.
More worryingly, scanning of personal data like passport information at airports has now been automated without the general public’s knowledge or direct agreement. Once again surveillance and privacy rights have been taken away and hidden under the guise of convenience.
Have we entered a new era and world without even realizing it? I mean, instructors and students still say “write a paper” instead of “type an essay.” We still say “write a blog post” instead of “type a blog post.” By definition, we “type” not “write” online unless we write on paper first then type that for use online. Maybe our incorrect usage of such terms reveals how we still live in the past somehow. Then again, Baudelaire did not know he was in the beginnings of what would later be termed modernism. How we would know what’s happening to us today without the power of hindsight or perhaps a highly-advanced AI able to accurately predict and tell us the future? Or, a Baudelaire?
The thing is, this new and modern world still mixed with the old is neither good nor bad, yet. Technology itself is not (yet) intrinsically bad or good either. The potential is for it to go either way because of humans. It’s what we do as a collective whole, as active global citizens in fighting for the good, that will determine whether the future is good or bad, whether the new is better than the old. Then again, what is good and who determines it?
Niall's Modern Poetry Blog 