Check out the creepy, romantic poetry written by Google’s AI after being force fed nearly 3500 books

While Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) spoke with grammatical accuracy and factual exactness, its language remained abrupt and floppy. To make it more chatty, researchers from the company’s deep learning arm, Google Brain force-fed 2,865 romance books, about 1,500 fantasy books, and more into the AI system.

The unpublished paper “Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space” was presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations on May 3, which shows the work done by researchers with Google Brain. It shows how the team of linguists and computer scientists fed a total of 11,000 unpublished books to the neural network, and then tested whether it could take a couple sentences from the book and create its own corresponding phrases.

For instance, the researchers say to the system: Create 13 sentences that morph from “I’m fine” to “But you need to talk to me now.” Each sentence in the series should be similar in meaning to the one before and after it to create a smooth transition. Also, they need to grammatically and syntactically make sense. The point is to imitate the differences in human speech and create a system that can create new and diverse sentences.

However, the results sound like cryptic, dark poems. Here’s one of the resulting poems:

No.

he said.

“no,” he said.

“no,” i said.

“i know,” she said.

“thank you,” she said.

“come with me,” she said.

“talk to me,” she said.

“don’t worry about it,” she said.

it made me want to cry.

no one had seen him since.

it made me feel uneasy.

no one had seen him.

the thought made me smile.

the pain was unbearable.

the crowd was silent.

the man called out.

the old man said.

the man asked.

he was silent for a long moment.

he was silent for a moment.

it was quiet for a moment.

it was dark and cold.

there was a pause.

it was my turn.

there is no one else in the world.

there is no one else in sight.

they were the only ones who mattered.

they were the only ones left.

he had to be with me.

she had to be with him.

i had to do this.

i wanted to kill him.

i started to cry.

i turned to him.

This is just a small part of Google’s work with AI and the goal of presenting it with human language capabilities. While the team stated that their software is in early stages of work, it is expected to be a long and on-going process to make it able to interact with users in a way that has all the complexity and flexibility of natural speech.