Description
Experimental poetry written using ChucK with Word2Vec involving text, sound, and time. More info: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/wiki/356-winter-2023/etude1
Videos
Analogy Poem
Romeo and Juliet Mad Libs Poem
Code
Download ZipReflection
The first poem I worked on was the analogy poem. I came up with the idea after thinking about how you could generate similar analogies when given a starting analogy. As I was working on it, I realized that the analogies that the program was coming up with were sometimes really funny because it would come up with analogies that either didn’t make any sense or were strangely accurate. But I think it was most funny when I typed in an analogy that was more of an opinion than fact. For example, the following poem was generated after inputting “stanford stupid.”
stanford is stupid
yale is dumb
ucla is awful
princeton is silly
harvard is foolish
rutgers is disgusting
georgetown is ridiculous
asu is idiotic
"Analogy Poem"
If a human wrote this poem, I don’t think it would be that interesting or funny. However, I think what makes this poem funny is that you can tell people that an AI wrote it. While this program spitting this poem out does not make these statements factual, it almost feels like they are because the computer can’t have opinions and is performing vector arithmetic to generate this poem.
After this realization, I worked on the Romeo and Juliet mad libs poem with the idea that an AI might come up with comical conclusions about the relationship between two people just from their names. For example, someone could type in the names of two people they know and discover from the poem that the program makes up whether those two people are enemies, exes, lovers, pals, or married. Again, this can’t possibly be fact, but it is funny to think about what the AI thinks the relationship is just based on names. It is also thrilling to see what the AI thinks, similar to how it might be fun to read a horoscope prediction or a fortune cookie fortune despite knowing that it is bogus.
Acknowledgements
I used this website to inspire my romeo and juliet mad libs poem: https://www.madtakes.com/libs/186.html