I don't think "poet" is what people worry about when they worry about robots taking their jobs. Ai-Da is a highly realistic, artificial intelligence-driven robot that can paint, draw, sculpt, and write its own poetry.
Ai- Da gave a public performance of poetry created in commemoration of Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The event took place at the University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum as part of an exhibit honoring the 700th anniversary of Dante's death.
She was given all 14,233 lines of Dante's "Divine Comedy" to digest and then, by using her data bank of words and speech pattern analysis programs, she was able to draw on them.
A lot of poetry is included in the results. Maybe it is too high-brow for me. I could be distracted by her eyes and not feel anything. Here is a sample to judge for yourself, courtesy of the Guardian.
We looked up from our verse, but it never came, and we needed a needle and thread to complete the picture.
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Since the robot's first solo exhibition in 2019, a series of artistic performances have been driven by artificial intelligence. Ai-Da was created in collaboration with scientists at the universities of Oxford and Leeds and a U.K.-based robotics company.
According to Meller, Ai-Da can produce as many as 20,000 words in 10 seconds. The words and sentence structure in her poetry are entirely artificial, and her human handler does engage in some "restrictive editing" of her content.
He told the outlet that people are suspicious that the robots aren't doing much, but the reality is language models are very advanced, and in 95 percent of cases of editing, it's just that she's done too much. He said that soon, they will be completely indistinguishable from human text.
Meller said in an interview with CNN that Ai-Da's ability to imitate human writing is so great, if you read it, you wouldn't know that it wasn't written by a human.
He told the outlet that the Ai-Da project was developed to address the debate over the ethics of further developing artificial intelligence to imitate humans and human behavior. It is finally dawning on us that technology is having a major impact on all aspects of life and we are looking to understand just how much this technology can do and what it can teach us about ourselves.
The concept of Ai-Da competing with human poets was described as fundamentally unnerving by Meller. Ai-Da was not designed to replace human artists, but rather as a tool to glean insight into our own patterns of behavior to build better strategies in the face of an increasingly online world.
He told the outlet that all of us should be concerned about how widespread use of artificial intelligence will affect language and meaning in the future. If computer programs are creating content that shapes and impacts the human psyche and society, then this creates a critical shift and change to the use and impact of language, which we need to be discussing and thinking about.
