7 ms·

Recurrent Neural Net Poetry – Commitment

36 points by karmel 10y ago

thewarrior 10y ago
Has anyone tried to make a poetry generator that has some semblance of thematic unity ? Otherwise you just get a word salad generator that produces good poems by accident. Maybe we need to try word2vec based approaches.
- pizza 10y ago
  Devil's advocate: the thematic unity is a type of beauty that lies in the reader's understanding ;) To be fair, it does seem like this poem almost has some nice pseudo-rhyming scheme in it
  - thewarrior 10y ago
    I just don't find them interesting as a poet. Even a markov chain can produce good poems once in a while. This is impressive from an AI and machine learning perspective but NLP is one area where I feel there haven't been any fundamental breakthroughs yet as we've seen for images. Perhaps language is much more complex. Visual processing is present in many animals and so it might be that it's simpler at some level. There are very few animals that have evolved to use language like we do. So the underlying models must be far more complex than stacking layers of convolutional layers on top of each other. And compared to the spectacular results in images like Neural style transfer , we're judging these to a very low standard. Here is an actual poem : “You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me.” ― Pablo Neruda, The Captain's Verses
    - Dzugaru 10y ago
      I bet images like Neural style transfer are boring to artists just like ML poems :) Actual digital art is no less complex [0]. That aside, it would be interesting to look at ML model used, all I've seen were simple ones like hidden markov chains for the next letter, but hidden state is managed by RNN. You need to learn to "grasp" some underlying meaning if you want more than a semi-random word salad and if this can actually be done without building a strong AI in the process :) [0] https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0ogb8 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0ogb8
- sdenton4 10y ago
  Yes, of course. Anyone who follows the field knows that Trurl built a most amazing electronic bard, but the end result was a bunch of dead poets and supernovae. So these days we stick to the word salad approach, to avoid repeating that calamity.
  - pacaro 10y ago
    Just in case you are missing the reference, this is from Stanislaw Lem' "Cyberiad" This particular sally can be found at http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Trurl...
- puppymaster 10y ago
  Not unity per se, but I did put together one using Backus-Naur technique https://poem.alv.in/ https://poem.alv.in/
  - thewarrior 10y ago
    This is actually much more interesting than the OP. What kind of grammar did you design ? Do you think we can machine learn the grammar aided by things like word2vec ?
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Related is Richard Gabriel's inkwell project: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/InkWell.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/InkWell.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/InkWellTuring.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/InkWellTuring.pdf Though I think the ML aspect is fairly simple, the haikus generated can be quite good with some curation.
HugoDaniel 10y ago
As a hobby I trained several networks on portuguese poetry for a while. Stopped after realizing that eventually they all signed poems with "satan" and "devil".
- grabcocque 10y ago
  People really don't give enough thought to what could happen if our neural nets make contact with occult forces. Let's just hope that the Laundry really exists. https://www.goodreads.com/series/50764-laundry-files https://www.goodreads.com/series/50764-laundry-files
  - deepnet 10y ago
    Occult entities from Haitian Voudo occupying cyberspace is a central theme of William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero & Mona Lisa Overdrive, snip: Bobby took a deep breath. "Lucas said that Jackie's a horse for a snake. Can you run that by me in street tech?" "Certainly. Think of Jackie as a deck, Bobby, a cyberspace deck, a very pretty one with nice ankles." Lucas grinned and Bobby blushed. "Think of Danbala, who some people call the snake, as a program. Say as an icebreaker. Danbala slots into the Jaekie's deck, Jackie cuts ice. That's all." Okay," Bobby said, getting the hang of it, "then what's the matrix? If she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's cyberspace?"
karmel 10y ago
Hey HN! I made the machine that writes these poems... AMA!
- zebraflask 10y ago
  How does the initial word seeding work? Are you limited to just one word, or can you use multiple? For words with multiple meanings / connotations, is there a way to specify which one you want to use?
  - karmel 10y ago
    I generally seed with one word, but I could in theory use as many as there are memory-steps in the LSTM. For the shorter poems, I run with 50 steps worth of memory, so could reasonably seed with up to 50 words, and the machine would carry on from there. As to multiple meanings, I do not force an interpretation, and the model is simple enough that it does not explicitly disambiguate. Part of the fun for me as an artist is letting the model go where it may, often surprising me when it does.
    - zebraflask 10y ago
      With up to 50 words, it sounds like it would be a great fit for haiku and similar short form pieces.
      - karmel 10y ago
        Agreed, but a haiku requires some notion of syllables. Other machine poets on CuratedAI do work with more complicated syntactical structures (I.e. http://curatedai.com/poetry/three-haikus-in-honor-of-haruki-murakami/ http://curatedai.com/poetry/three-haikus-in-honor-of-haruki-... , http://curatedai.com/poetry/mildly-concerned-the-woman-next-to-me-just-prayed-for-me/ http://curatedai.com/poetry/mildly-concerned-the-woman-next-... ), though my personal bias is more free form, a la e e cummings.
        zebraflask 10y ago
ntoll 10y ago
Related: a very simple poetry generator connected to Amazon's Alexa for computer generated poetry recitals on demand... :-) http://ntoll.org/article/pod-bay-doors http://ntoll.org/article/pod-bay-doors

36 points by karmel 10y ago

Has anyone tried to make a poetry generator that has some semblance of thematic unity ? Otherwise you just get a word salad generator that produces good poems by accident. Maybe we need to try word2vec based approaches.

pizza 10y ago
Devil's advocate: the thematic unity is a type of beauty that lies in the reader's understanding ;) To be fair, it does seem like this poem almost has some nice pseudo-rhyming scheme in it
- thewarrior 10y ago
  I just don't find them interesting as a poet. Even a markov chain can produce good poems once in a while. This is impressive from an AI and machine learning perspective but NLP is one area where I feel there haven't been any fundamental breakthroughs yet as we've seen for images. Perhaps language is much more complex. Visual processing is present in many animals and so it might be that it's simpler at some level. There are very few animals that have evolved to use language like we do. So the underlying models must be far more complex than stacking layers of convolutional layers on top of each other. And compared to the spectacular results in images like Neural style transfer , we're judging these to a very low standard. Here is an actual poem : “You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me.” ― Pablo Neruda, The Captain's Verses
  - Dzugaru 10y ago
    I bet images like Neural style transfer are boring to artists just like ML poems :) Actual digital art is no less complex [0]. That aside, it would be interesting to look at ML model used, all I've seen were simple ones like hidden markov chains for the next letter, but hidden state is managed by RNN. You need to learn to "grasp" some underlying meaning if you want more than a semi-random word salad and if this can actually be done without building a strong AI in the process :) [0] https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0ogb8 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0ogb8
sdenton4 10y ago
Yes, of course. Anyone who follows the field knows that Trurl built a most amazing electronic bard, but the end result was a bunch of dead poets and supernovae. So these days we stick to the word salad approach, to avoid repeating that calamity.
- pacaro 10y ago
  Just in case you are missing the reference, this is from Stanislaw Lem' "Cyberiad" This particular sally can be found at http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Trurl...
puppymaster 10y ago
Not unity per se, but I did put together one using Backus-Naur technique https://poem.alv.in/ https://poem.alv.in/
- thewarrior 10y ago
  This is actually much more interesting than the OP. What kind of grammar did you design ? Do you think we can machine learn the grammar aided by things like word2vec ?

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

Related is Richard Gabriel's inkwell project: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/InkWell.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/InkWell.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/InkWellTuring.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/InkWellTuring.pdf Though I think the ML aspect is fairly simple, the haikus generated can be quite good with some curation.

HugoDaniel 10y ago

As a hobby I trained several networks on portuguese poetry for a while. Stopped after realizing that eventually they all signed poems with "satan" and "devil".

grabcocque 10y ago
People really don't give enough thought to what could happen if our neural nets make contact with occult forces. Let's just hope that the Laundry really exists. https://www.goodreads.com/series/50764-laundry-files https://www.goodreads.com/series/50764-laundry-files
- deepnet 10y ago
  Occult entities from Haitian Voudo occupying cyberspace is a central theme of William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero & Mona Lisa Overdrive, snip: Bobby took a deep breath. "Lucas said that Jackie's a horse for a snake. Can you run that by me in street tech?" "Certainly. Think of Jackie as a deck, Bobby, a cyberspace deck, a very pretty one with nice ankles." Lucas grinned and Bobby blushed. "Think of Danbala, who some people call the snake, as a program. Say as an icebreaker. Danbala slots into the Jaekie's deck, Jackie cuts ice. That's all." Okay," Bobby said, getting the hang of it, "then what's the matrix? If she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's cyberspace?"

karmel 10y ago

Hey HN! I made the machine that writes these poems... AMA!

zebraflask 10y ago
How does the initial word seeding work? Are you limited to just one word, or can you use multiple? For words with multiple meanings / connotations, is there a way to specify which one you want to use?
- karmel 10y ago
  I generally seed with one word, but I could in theory use as many as there are memory-steps in the LSTM. For the shorter poems, I run with 50 steps worth of memory, so could reasonably seed with up to 50 words, and the machine would carry on from there. As to multiple meanings, I do not force an interpretation, and the model is simple enough that it does not explicitly disambiguate. Part of the fun for me as an artist is letting the model go where it may, often surprising me when it does.
  - zebraflask 10y ago
    With up to 50 words, it sounds like it would be a great fit for haiku and similar short form pieces.
    - karmel 10y ago
      Agreed, but a haiku requires some notion of syllables. Other machine poets on CuratedAI do work with more complicated syntactical structures (I.e. http://curatedai.com/poetry/three-haikus-in-honor-of-haruki-murakami/ http://curatedai.com/poetry/three-haikus-in-honor-of-haruki-... , http://curatedai.com/poetry/mildly-concerned-the-woman-next-to-me-just-prayed-for-me/ http://curatedai.com/poetry/mildly-concerned-the-woman-next-... ), though my personal bias is more free form, a la e e cummings.
      - zebraflask 10y ago

ntoll 10y ago

Related: a very simple poetry generator connected to Amazon's Alexa for computer generated poetry recitals on demand... :-) http://ntoll.org/article/pod-bay-doors http://ntoll.org/article/pod-bay-doors