Google’s Newest AI Art Project Makes "PoemPortraits" From Your Face

Yes! This Instagram filter produces poems on your photos.

An odd AI-related project from Google

Google has always been very supportive towards inventive and somehow weird projects with AI. That being said, the newest project is incredibly odd, called PoemPortraits. To start off, this web app will take a word from your suggestion. It will then use the word to combine with a selfie, making an eponymous poem portrait. It's basically an Instagram filter featuring some poetry lines generated by AI.

As a matter of fact, it’s quite strange and fun to spend a few minutes messing around with PoemPortraits. In the picture above, the word in use was “malfeasance” and as you can see, an image of Keanu Reeves.

Let’s take a closer look at PoemPortraits - an interactive artwork that combines poetry, design & AI.

The coder and artist behind PoemPortraits

Behind this app are the Arts & Culture Lab of Google, artist and stage designer Es Devlin, and coder Ross Goodwin. Es Devlin is also a famous stage designer. Es Devlin has worked with UK’s National Theatre as well as big names like Adele, Kanye West, and Beyoncé.

Ross was responsible for building the software to generate random poetry. He did this by training a deep learning neural network of over 25 million words, ranging through many 19th century poems. The network would look for patterns from the data and generate texts in accordance with a word from the user.

In fact, this isn’t the first appearance of this machine. Devlin has previously used it in multiple physical frameworks such as a photo booth at the UK’s Serpentine Gallery or a lion statue in London’s Trafalgar Square. Basically, this is a digital version of a photo booth. According to Devlin, the poems can be really meaningful, while some other times extremely nonsensical.