Google’s ‘Verse by Verse’ can help you write poetry

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Google has launched a new tool to let anyone create poems in the style of famous poets using artificial intelligence.

Verse by Verse feature helps users mimic the style of a particular poet, from the 22 poets the tool offers, and after taking inputs from both human and machine, the tool creates a final poem.

Users can choose up to three poets from a list of popular poets including Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost, and others.

After choosing which poets to act as muses, the tool will ask users to design the poem structure. They can decide their poetic form, syllable count, and the rhyme of the poem.

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Once the structure of the poem is decided, composing process begins. Following the first line of verse, the feature will start to suggest possible next verse.

Users can choose to continue writing their own verses, use one of the suggestions, or even edit one of the suggestions to make it more personal. Once the poem is ready, they can give it a title, finalise and save it.

Google explained that Verse by Verse's suggestions are not the original lines of verse the poets had written, but novel verses generated to sound like lines of verse the poets could have written.

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To build the tool, Google’s engineers trained models on a large collection of classic poetry. They fine-tuned the models on each individual poet’s body of work to try to capture their style of writing.

Additionally, the system was trained to have a general semantic understanding of what lines of verse would best follow a previous line of verse so that even people who write on topics not commonly seen in classic poetry can be fed with relevant suggestions.

Through the tool, Google aims to ‘augment’ the creative process of composing a poem. Google said Verse by Verse is a creative helper, an inspiration and not a replacement.