Visualising Poetry with AI
Early experiments with generative AI
Background
Note: This was originally published August 2022 on my Medium blog before the ChatGPT-driven AI craze started.
Given the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its two subcategories known as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and generative adversarial networks (GAN), a plethora of new platforms have emerged on the Internet combining the create a new art form or a category of art: text-to-image art.
The latest text-to-image tools such as DALL*E 2, Midjourney and NightCafe are so powerful and simple to use that today everyone with a access to internet can become an artist in a matter of minutes. Having painted a bit in my teens and having always had an interest in poetry, I decided to find out if there is a budding poetic artist (or an artistic poet for that matter) in me after all. So I took one of the platform NightCafe (which I found easiest to use) out for a spin.
Les Fleurs du Mal
Les Fleurs du Mal is a poetry collection by the great French poet Charles Baudelaire from the 19th century. Given that his poems are either very depressing, or very beautiful, or sometimes both, I picked one from the latter category titled Albatross, which talks about the beauty and existential suffering of being a poet. The English translation is below, but you can also find the French original on FlreursDuMal.org.
The Albatross
Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.
Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.
That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!
The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.
Charles Baudelaire (translated by William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil)
Instead of feeding the entire poem into AI, thought let us first start with a few lines so chose the following passage:
The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman
Results
After a few clicks and a few minutes of processing, NightCafe generated my come-back art piece shown below.
Figure — Passage of Albatross as Read and Seen by Text-to-Image AI
If you liked the image above, please give me a star, or whatever your favourite emoji to this post to support my budding international internet artist career. If you did not like the image above, stop reading now, or simply visit TikTok instead as they recently implemented their own text-to-image algorithm.
Applications
One of the most obvious applications of this new technology would be book and magazine story illustrations, but there certainly will be many others — a picture is more than thousand words, as the old saying goes.