AI's first poem has already been written

The first ever poem written by artificial intelligence has already been written. I don't know when, by who, or even what was written, but I can say with relative certainty that it has been done.

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How can I make such a bold claim without having any evidence? Because it’s up to interpretation. Disregarding the contentious definition of “poem,” how does one define “The first ever poem written by artificial intelligence?” First seems relatively straightforward: there was no poem written in this way before. But what about artificial intelligence? Artificial is a bit hard to pin down by itself, but for the sake of argument let’s go with the gut instinct of how we imagine artificial intelligence: computer, or more generally electronic. Intelligence, though, is where I think things get quite difficult.

The vast majority of people would agree with the statement “humans are intelligent.” I know I would. What about animals? I often hear the factoid that pigs are fifteen times smarter than dogs. There are many other, more concrete, examples of animals’ problem solving: crows identifying shapes, monkeys’ understanding of grape economics, pigeons that guided bombs. But would you say they’re intelligent? If we expand beyond vertebrates, does your position change; would you consider sea stars intelligent? We can go further still. Are plants intelligent? I have a feeling most people would say no.

A common definition for intelligence that I’ve heard is the ability to learn. Yet this doesn’t help much in the pursuit of a rigid definition of intelligence. Is a tree not “learning” when it adapts to a new or changing environment? Does learning have to happen in a specific time frame? If a species develops new abilities over time as a result of evolution, is that learning?

I choose to define intelligence very loosely: the ability to make decisions; to do different things depending on various inputs. With this definition I would say that any computer or even any logic circuit is “intelligent.” With the boundless creativity of humans, I’m sure someone has attempted to have a computer write a poem. So it naturally follows that an artificial intelligence has already written a poem. I don’t have any idea when the first one was written or what it looked like, but I don’t think that matters very much.

I don’t stretch these definitions so far just to be evasive. Artificial intelligence as we imagine it (and see it!) today is a fantastical concept. It’s bizzare to think that something so seemingly dumb (computers) can produce output that rivals humans. But with it come many questions. For example: if a computer can exactly mirror the neurons firing in a human brain, can its output be distinguished from human thought? Many things we hold to be innately true break down when taken to such extremes. When faced with a seemingly infinite number of questions, often the easiest way out is to accept the broadest conclusions.

To be more concrete (and slightly less evasive), there are so many ways to create a poem. You could tell the computer to arrange characters completely randomly. Or words. Maybe feed the computer poems created by humans and have it generate sentences based on the likelihood of specific words following other words (Markov Chain). Perhaps ask a human to rate each output (Supervised Learning), or find some other way of classifying it as “poem” or “not poem,” and have the computer tweak its algorithm ever so slightly until it finds a sweet spot where the ratio of poems to not poems seems to be maximized (Machine Learning).

One way to think of intelligence is as a spectrum. All the way from simple branching logic (if condition 1 is met then do A, if condition 2 is met then do B) to superintelligence, I would say any could write a poem. The “poems” they write would probably be vastly different. However I imagine most people would not classify the writing generated by lower intelligence systems as poetry, so my last answer is that the first poem written by an artificial intelligence would look identical to a typical poem written by a human, because after all we as humans are doing the judging.