Now create a poem portrait with Google AI

Google has unveiled an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based web app that will create a poem portrait for you. Called "POEMPORTRAITS," the online collective artwork is a combination of poetry, design and Machine Learning (ML).

"A 'POEMPORTRAIT' is your self-portrait overlaid with a unique poem, created by AI. You can create your own and contribute to the evolving, collective poem," Google said in a blog post on Thursday. To create your poem portrait, donate a word of your choice and take a self-portrait.

Each word you donate will be expanded into original lines of poetry by an algorithm that's trained on millions of words of 19th century poetry. "You'll then receive a unique POEMPORTRAIT of your face, illuminated by your original lines of poetry. All of the lines of poetry are then combined to form an ever-evolving, collective poem," said Google.

Es Devlin, a famous artist and stage designer, collaborated with Google Arts and Culture Lab, and coder Ross Goodwin for the project. Ross trained an algorithm to learn to write poems by reading over 25 million words written by 19th century poets.

"It works a bit like predictive text: it doesn't copy or rework existing phrases but uses its training material to build a complex statistical model. As a result, the algorithm generates original phrases emulating the style of what it's been trained on," said Google.