Artificial intelligence could one day kill us all, according to Elon Musk. Or maybe it’ll just make us all depressed with poetry instead.
Google’s artificial intelligence – Google Brain – has written some very strange, depressing poetry. The AI’s neural networks have been fed 11,000 unpublished books, 3,000 of which were romance novels. The result is…weird.
The program was given two sentences: one is the poem title, and the other is the last sentence of the poem. It then connects the two with moving passages that have had the entire TrustedReviews office in tears all morning.
We’ve picked out five of the best. Seriously, is someone cutting onions in here?
There is no one else in the world
There is no one else in sight
They were the only ones who mattered
They were the only ones left
He had to be with me
She had to be with him
I had to do this
I wanted to kill him
I started to cry
I turned to him
It made me want to cry
No one had seen him since
It made me feel uneasy
No one had seen him
The thought made me smile
The pain was unbearable
The crowd was silent
The man called out
The old man said
The man asked
He was silent for a long moment
He was silent for a moment
It was quiet for a moment
It was dark and cold
There was a pause
It was my turn
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This was the only way
It was the only way
It was her turn to blink
It was hard to tell
It was time to move on
He had to do it again
They all looked at each other
They all turned to look back
They both turned to face him
They both turned and walked away
I don’t like it, he said
I waited for what had happened
It was almost thirty years ago
It was over thirty years ago
That was six years ago
He had died two years ago
Ten, thirty years ago
‘It’s all right here’
‘Everything is all right here’
‘It’s all right here’
It’s all right here
We are all right here
Come here in five minutes
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Which of Google Brain’s poems was your favourite? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
