In recent years we have seen incredible improvements in AI. The technology is changing the way we do business and even how we interact with each other. As with all changes, people have feared that the continuous technological improvements might replace human jobs. How far a long are we from an AI assistant replacing a human assistant? Google’s Duplex is now able to make calls and schedule appointments with Google Assistant. However, not many people think of AI technology replacing jobs in the art industry. Art is namely all about emotions and many people believe that the biggest challenge for AI is to understand human emotions. Even though this challenge remains, AI is making its way in the art industry by writing poetry.
Microsoft’s AI named Xiaoice, which literally translated to ‘Microsoft Little Ice’, has already written over ten thousand poems in only 2760 hours. Not only has it written this amount of poems, there has actually been a poetry book published with its best work. The publisher named Cheers Publishing claims that this is the first published book to ever be written by an AI. The poetry book consists of 139 poems the AI has written. The book is divided in to ten chapters with every chapter having a human emotion as a theme. Examples of these emotions are joy or loneliness.
The AI first studied poems of 519 poets dating back to the 1920’s. Xiaoice uses pictures in the process of writing poems. Huang, chief producer of the book, says: “Every time it sees a picture, it gets inspired and creates modern poems. The process is basically the same as for a real poet”
Before the book was published, the AI already published some of its poetry online under several aliases. A few people did notice however that it was not a human writing the poetry. Some of the poetry sounds a bit repetitive or as if an inexperienced poet writes it. Critics of the AI poetry have said that a robot will never replace a human poet, since it will always lack true emotion.
Whether or not, AI might be able to replace a human poet, the poetry book written by Microsoft’s AI is a good example of how rapidly our digital world is changing.
Read more about the poetry here:
http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0531/c90000-9222463.html
https://www.technotification.com/2018/05/microsofts-ai-xiaoice.html.
