The ultra-realistic robot was the first to write and interpret poetry “like a human” at the Oxford Ashmolean Museum
Ai-Da, the humanoid AI artist who made history in 2019, became the first robot to draw without human intervention, is now an AI poet . Her first appearance? A concert at Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum in response to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, AiDa’s original poems are based directly on the epic that was given to her to read in English translation. She then used her unique algorithms and a database of words and speech pattern analysis to write her own work in response to Dante’s.
Ai-Da isn’t the first AI to write poetry: in 2018, an artificial intelligence deep learning robot from IBM Research Australia produced verses about Shakespeare sonnets, while Robyn performed AI-generated poems by Aidan Meller for Dazed in Oxford in 2018 Lovelace) is the first to write and interpret poetry “like a person”.
“There are things that are so difficult, so unpredictable,” began one of the poems she performed on Friday evening (November 26th) in the Ashmolean Museum. Words cannot be understood by the human ear; / She can only speculate what they mean. ”
Another poem reads: “We looked up from our verses like blindfolded captives, / Sent out to seek the light; but it never came, / A needle and thread would be necessary / For the completion of the picture. / To view the poor creatures, who were in misery, / That of a hawk, eyes sewn shut.”
Speaking to The Guardian before the performance, Meller says, “People are very suspicious that robots don’t do a lot, but the reality is that language models are very advanced.” She admits that “limited editing” is involved in the songwriting process, but adds, “95 percent of the time … it’s just that she’s done too much.”
“You can give us 20,000 words in 10 seconds and if we have to say something short and succinct we will distinguish it from what you did, but we are not the ones who write.”
Noting the growing ability of AI to mimic human handwriting, he goes on to say that “we should all be concerned about the widespread use of AI language models on the internet and how this affects language and especially creation” . of importance in the future “.
As well as contributing poetry, Ai-Da has produced visual artworks for the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition, “Dante: The Invention Of Celebrity”. One of these, Eyes Wide Shut, was produced in response to her detainment last month, when Egyptian border agents held her for 10 days on suspicion of being a spy.
