Why does AI write poetry? A new episode of "Let's Speak Russian!"

While browsing the website of the Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, I found a new episode of the programme "Let's Speak Russian!" (Говорим по-русски!) with a question that caught my attention: "Why does AI write poetry?" For anyone learning languages and curious about how a language behaves in the hands of a machine, the topic is fascinating.

The guest was Boris Orekhov, a PhD in philology and associate professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. He experiments digitally with poetry and wrote the book "Electronic Lyre" (Электронная лира).

The conversation covers three themes. First, why artificial intelligence writes poetry at all, and how it does it. Second, whether poetry can be compared to cryptography, and a poetic text to a chess game that can be played out. Third, who should be considered the author of a prompt: the writer, or the AI as co-author.

The second idea interests me most. Comparing a poem to a cipher or a chess game turns poetry into a system of rules within which one can search for moves, and that makes it clear why such a task suits language models. The third question, about authorship of the prompt, still looks open, and I would love to read how you would answer it.

The episode is available on the YouTube channels of IRYa RAS and on the project's VK channel. If you are studying Russian, programmes like this are a good way to listen to philologists talking about a fascinating subject in lively speech.

Source: Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences