
Recurrent Neural Net Poetry – Commitment - karmel
http://curatedai.com/poetry/commitment/
======
HugoDaniel
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
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
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?"

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thewarrior
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.

~~~
sdenton4
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
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/Trurl...](http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf)

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

~~~
zebraflask
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
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
With up to 50 words, it sounds like it would be a great fit for haiku and
similar short form pieces.

~~~
karmel
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-...](http://curatedai.com/poetry/three-haikus-in-honor-of-haruki-
murakami/) , [http://curatedai.com/poetry/mildly-concerned-the-woman-
next-...](http://curatedai.com/poetry/mildly-concerned-the-woman-next-to-me-
just-prayed-for-me/) ), though my personal bias is more free form, a la e e
cummings.

~~~
zebraflask
Even free form has to have a little structure, don't you think? Know rules
before you break them?

How do you think it would handle Milton?

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ntoll
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)

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seanmcdirmid
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.

