BENGALURU: Poetry is believed to come from the soul, but what if it could be generated by a well-coded algorithm? Can machines do better than us?
When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade
Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn
The daytime shadow of my love betray’d
Lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form….
An MIT PhD student J Nathan Matias created this poem by teaching a machine how to compose sonnets. He used a dataset of Shakespeare’s words and fed them into an algorithm. When he ran it, the lines of code generated this sonnet.
The concept has now been adopted by Gathr, a group of four individuals popular for providing alternative social experiences especially on weekends, in association with Venturesity that organizes hackathons to work on real and everyday problems.
Bharat Ramakrishna, manager of Venturesity, mooted the idea -- of creating literature through coding -- first, a couple of months ago. He thought of this when one of the designers he had met recited poetry to tell a story of the product.
Techies and Poets
“I had met a bunch of designers in the US and one of them was very good at poetry,” says Bharat. “Then I wondered what could be the outcome of combining technology with literature.” “Initially the idea was to organize code-poetry slam and then I Googled and found that other universities such as Stanford had already done it,” he says. These slams are where participants explore the poesy in computer code. “Then I thought instead of doing a slam around it let’s have a discussion and a hands-on project to marry literature and coding,” says Bharat.
It is to be noted that the event is not about AI creating literature but rather exploring the process of it, Bharat emphasizes. The concept is new in India and about 30 coders and non-coders will get together at Church Street Social today and brainstorm if coding and poetry have anything in common at all.
Bengaluru is the IT capital of India, we want to see if coding and poetry can go side by side,” says Arvind Ghimiray, who is a part of Gathr and will be attending the event. “We also want to ensure that coding is not just something functional but provides an aesthetic experience,” adds Badrinarayanan Seetharaman, co-founder of Gathr.
Good Poems are Simple
Matias’s poem was fed the words from Shakespeare’s sonnets, in the same way, the event will use lyrics from Bob Dylan’s songs. Matias believes that one of the best poems is written in the simplest of forms.
“T. S Eliot in his 1917 Reflections on vers libre has described what makes a poem interesting or alive. His ideas, which are by no means conclusive, have inspired well-crafted poetry for almost a hundred years, without imposing limits on it,” says Nathan to City Express. Matias, developer of Swift-Speare app that provides a touchscreen interface to write poetry, is delighted that youngsters in Bengaluru are delving and exploring AI poetry.
He says that participants should use this opportunity to think about what they look for in a poem over anything else. “Writing poetry is, at its heart, an endeavor to find something beautiful,” he says. “But it should not restrict imagination but inspire it.”
Can a Computer Understand Similes
The session will start with a talk and conversations on what language essentially is and then will come the hackathon. Questions such as computer’s understanding of similes and metaphors, its potential to analyse syllables and meter, and if codes can learn from the natural human language will be answered by the end of the day.