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Artificial eloquence: the weird science of computer-generated poetry

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Developers and programmers are constantly striving to lend computers a more poetic voice through the use of complex algorithms and other approaches. Here we've gathered the latest news stories about computer-generated poetry and similar experiments.

  • Chris Welch

    Apr 29, 2013

    Chris Welch

    Tapping Project Gutenberg to create computer-generated 'snowball' poems

    Poetry Shutterstock
    Poetry Shutterstock

    In yet another example of computers churning out art, Paul Thompson has built a C++ script that produces snowballs — poems where every line is a single word, with each successive word one letter longer than its predecessor. "I thought that someone must have created a program to generate these, and I was surprised that I couldn’t find one even after some pretty thorough Googling," Thompson writes on his blog. That led the part-time programmer to develop his own solution. Thompson's code scans through a massive text file of numerous combined works from Project Gutenberg. All character names are ignored as the poem is crafted, as are any foreign phrases included in the source material. His formula also relies on Markov chains to build out the finalized poem, though Thompson readily admits his somewhat elementary approach isn't perfect. "The output will, for the most part, be absolute rubbish," he says. "But there will be wheat in the chaff." We've included one of those eloquent examples below.

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  • Chris Welch

    Apr 1, 2013

    Chris Welch

    New York Times launches 'Times Haiku' Tumblr, makes poetry out of front page articles

    Times Haiku
    Times Haiku

    The newspaper of record is venturing into poetry. Today may be April Fools Day, but Times Haiku — a new side project from The New York Times — is a wholly serious endeavor launching just in time for National Poetry Month. Nieman Journalism Lab has the full rundown on the Tumblr-based project, which spits out haikus generated from sentences on the NYT's homepage. It accomplishes this by matching words up against a dictionary that helpfully includes syllable count. Selections published to the blog are curated by humans, a necessary step since its creators admit Times Haiku "can't distinguish between an elegant verse and a plodding one."

    To build the whimsical project, developer Jacob Harris coded a script that digs through front page stories in search of ideal words and phrases and then arranges them in proper haiku format. Designer Heena Ko and software engineer Anjali Bhojani helped push the project across the finish line; they also decided to make haikus appear as images, a smart move that makes them easily shareable across various social networks.

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  • Jacob Kastrenakes

    Mar 18, 2013

    Jacob Kastrenakes

    Using public tweets / a developer finds art / in hidden haikus

    Twitter for Windows Phone
    Twitter for Windows Phone

    One developer has found the perfect way to take advantage of Twitter's new support for line breaks: haikus. Using the public Twitter stream and a Python tool that can determine the number of syllables in most English words, Brandon at h6o6 has found a way to collect the haikus hidden in plain sight on Twitter. You probably won't see the poems collected at Tweet Haikus in the next great found poetry anthology, but that doesn't mean there isn't some accidental beauty in the results — after all, the charm of @Horse_ebooks has nothing to do with well-prepared prose.

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  • Amar Toor

    Feb 8, 2013

    Amar Toor

    Spotify app turns song titles into Valentine's Day poetry

    spotify playlist poetry
    spotify playlist poetry

    Valentine's Day is fast approaching, which means it's time to start writing poetry and compiling mixtapes. Fortunately, Spotify's Playlist Poetry lets you kill both lovebirds with one stone. The app, announced yesterday, invites users to create poems entirely from song titles, and share the resulting playlist with their Special Someone. You can search Spotify's database for a specific word or phrase in a given title, and arrange the results into verse using a word magnet-like interface.

    The emphasis here is on words, rather than music. You can't search by artist, album, or any field other than song title, which can result in some unintentionally strange or nonsensical playlists. It's not exactly a new concept, but Playlist Poetry certainly makes it easier to visualize and construct your words of affection — or antipathy, as the case may be.

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  • Laura June

    Aug 29, 2012

    Laura June

    Twitter's favorite spambot, @Horse_ebooks, hits 100k followers

    Horse
    Horse

    If you're a Twitter user, you've likely come in contact with the spam account @Horse_ebooks at least once or twice, probably when someone you follow discovers him and loses all self control, retweeting every one of his many gems. If, however, you're unfamiliar with the Twittering world's most beloved equine chatterbox, here's a quick summary: @Horse_ebooks is a spambot, created to promote and presumably sell ebooks (Gawker investigated his origins and creator in depth earlier this year). Sometime yesterday or the day before, @Horse_ebooks passed the 100,000 follower mark: a remarkable achievement for a human, but a somewhat stunning one for a bot.

    The account Tweets out seemingly random phrases, from seemingly horse-related ebooks, resulting in verbose poetry such as:

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  • Janus Kopfstein

    May 16, 2012

    Janus Kopfstein

    Plinko poetry, a burrito printer, and more at NYU ITP's tech-art showcase

    ITP Spring Show
    ITP Spring Show

    Outside of the seasonal showcases for NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, you'd be hard-pressed to find an event in New York that packs so many novel art and technology experiments under one roof. This year's Spring Show, which ran Monday and Tuesday at the Tisch School in Manhattan's lower east side, was no exception: ITP students continue to play in the backyard of a bizarre and exciting new media fringe, creating all manner of contraptions, software, and ideas that drive fresh conversations about our rapidly-evolving tech landscape.

    One of the show's most unusual projects opens such a dialogue without actually utilizing the technology it describes: Guilherme Costa and Stephanie Kleinman's "GoogleBooth" re-imagines the search engine as a giant, opaque cube acting as a mysterious kind of information kiosk. Queries are written on sheets of paper and slipped through a "search" mail slot, and returned through a second slot with results at some later time. A peek behind the curtain reveals a lone woman, dutifully scouring through piles of reference books and surrounded by article clippings plastered to the walls - a celebration of the lost art of learning through research and study, re-contextualized within the bounds of a search bar.

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