Robots Are Coming for Our Poems

The robots are quickly and surely coming for our jobs, and we’ve comforted ourselves thus far with a palliative that goes something like this: They can’t do our creative work. They won’t do our journalism or make our art or write our poetry. Except that the startup Narrative Science has $6 million to execute its human-free reporting, I’ve seen firsthand an automated 3D printer artistically render the apocalypse, and now, the most unlikely frontier is being breached: Robots are writing poetry. And they’re doing it better than most humans, too.

Software programs and hardwired machines alike are wrangling their way into our sacred sphere of abstract language art. Not just the rampant poetic twitter bots, either—there are free-ranging poet Roombas and Shakespeare-mining algorithms, too. —Motherboard.