Google’s new AI creates personalised poem-selfies

‘Poem Portrait’ uses one word entered by the user, which is then expanded into original lines by an algorithm that has been trained using nineteenth-century poetry.

Google AI generated poem. (Google)

Google has built a new AI that uses your selfie and combines it with your choice of words to create your unique portrait, overlaid with poetry.

Developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, 'PoemPortrait', is an online collective artwork with a combination of poetry, design, and machine learning. Starting today, users can create their own custom portrait with poetry by heading to g.co/poemportraits.

To create their original selfie-poem artwork, users have to donate a word on the official page and take a selfie. Each word is then expanded into original lines of poetry by an algorithm that has been trained using nineteenth-century poetry. Users can choose to add a selfie to their poem, or receive just the text portrait.

"Ross trained an algorithm to learn to write poems by reading over 25 million words written by 19th century poets. It works a bit like predictive text: it doesn't copy or rework existing phrases, but uses its training material to build a complex statistical model. As a result, the algorithm generates original phrases emulating the style of what it's been trained on," Devlin explains in the blog post.

The AI then provides a unique PoemPortrait of the face, illuminated by the original lines of poetry. All the lines are then combined to form an ever-evolving, collective poem.