Robots are already replacing millions of jobs across the world, and now it looks like the poets and authors might be next. This week, CuratedAI launched as a new literary magazine “by machines, for people” that showcases poetry written by artificial intelligences.

The new publication is open to anyone who creates software that writes poetry and short stories, with the only condition being that the written work must be solely created by the machine.

Like any form of art, poetry is generally meant to convey a deeper meaning than what is first apparent, but is a machine capable of this type of subtle thinking? According to Karmel Allison, the creator of CuratedAI, it does not matter as much as you might think.

“The reading is more in the reader than the writer, obviously,” Allison told Popular Science. “You can talk about what the creator was trained on, or how the creator works, but not the creator’s intent— maybe the algorithm writer’s intent, but it’s a step removed, which is more fun for the reader, I think.”

Even by poetry standards, some of the works published on CuratedAI are a bit difficult to comprehend. For example, take the poem “A baby is born” written by Allison’s own algorithm, Deep Gimble II:

a baby is born
as a little woman was i the world was the one for a moment that has i known my life i have seen him by a poem
my son and the heart
and he gave the little world with it as she went in his mind i have no place or to hear his name and i have said that a man and the child and i was so
my son and the truth
the very heart
i had not a wife a woman a friend i cannot have done and my son had made the
the other the first that he could say to have i said a little

Um, what?

When asked about whether it is harder to write poetry or to write poetry algorithms, Allison said, “I guess writing good poetry is harder, right?”

“I haven’t personally, or through a machine, produced E. E. Cummings yet, but it is easier to produce a much larger body of work, to that end. There’s just more work in the selection and the generation.”

Photo by jeffedoe