Gertrude Stein’s Poetry Bot

Gertrude Stein was a Jewish Lesbian Poet. She wrote poems with a good amount of repetition. So we thought why don’t we try training a language model on her texts? Repetition is a LMs biggest flaw, isn’t it?

The advisor of my collegue, has studied her work extensively and invited us to try this on her. When we contacted him with the results he was really fascinated and told us in a way that the semantic network of the text has a uniqueness related to the author. This idea of impersonation was later central to all the other models we trained.

The Gertrude-Stein Language Model generates, really interesting stuff, poems, phrases of everyday wisdoms, sounding often like an old person (or young person) that says what it wants to say or like a punk.

She was the first twitter bot we built and I thank her for that. The sun was setting in Athens while I was working, away from my eyes and this endeavor of artificiality started with her (random) post:

“Oh yes you have completely missed the dawn.”

It’s still work in progress but you can find it here