Swift-Speare Wants To Turn You Into The Next Poetic Genius

Judging from pop culture indicators, our society is becoming increasingly sensitive to the way technology connects to us on an emotional level. We’ve moved past the idea of the cold, battle-armored cyborg as a model for human/tech hybrids to a more seamless and sensitively integrated dynamic.

Swift-Speare’s visual interface. Image © J Nathan Matias

Despite this drive to connect, when programs perform functions that we consider fundamentally human--like making art--it’s both fascinating and a little terrifying. This might be especially true when the artwork is rooted in the beautiful use of language, something for which artificial intelligence isn’t especially well known. At this turning point in technological advancements, it’s kind of a relief when even the most realistic androids still haven’t achieved fluid-sounding speech patterns.

Image © Boston Globe

Enter Swift-Speare. An experiment in ‘probable’ poetry, humans work together with artificial intelligence to shape ‘statistical’ poems that take on the characteristics of well-known authors. The program analyzes a poetry fragment and suggests a list of possible next words, one of which is chosen by a human named J Nathan Matias via a visual interface. It’s like blending the world’s best thesaurus with the predictive text algorithm on your iPhone, hopefully sans the embarrassing autocorrects. While the project takes its name from Shakespeare, Mathias is also analyzing and inputting works by Miton, Longfellow, and even…

Justin Bieber (real output from Swift-Speare):

I need somebody to be reality

The only thing that makes me crazy is your breath

and no matter what we've done whatever it could be

once in a star, once in my heart

Dancing close, baby

Suggested next words:

[,, 4.57498754258268e-05]

[oooh, 1.71562023751903e-05]

[nooo, 8.57810118759517e-06]

[doll, 2.85936721411417e-06]

[know, 2.85936721411417e-06]

[yeah, 1.42968360705709e-06]

Where the future aesthetic of the past saw a cold, cyborg future where humans became more like robots, it seems we now want to shape our tech to be more like us. Now we’re envisioning a warmer, more collaborative future- seamlessly integrated, and with a heartbeat.  Maybe we’re just hoping the machines will be kind to us when they’re the ones calling the shots.

via Techcrunch.