A new website called Poetry for Robots seeks to find out whether robots can learn human poetic language. It was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s theory that despite humanity’s near-infinite capacity for creating distinct metaphors, we still use the same ones over and over again in literature, like comparing eyes to the stars. The website asks the viewer to write a few lines of poetry based on an image—data that will later be used to test if a machine can use pattern-recognition to make the same poetic associations humans do.
I Am the Modern Man
Katie O'Brien
Katie O'Brien is an English major at Cornell University, where she writes for kitsch magazine, DJs for a rock station, and complains about the cold. Find her on Twitter @abluekite.