Some­thing real­ly wabi-sabi hap­pened to me the oth­er day. As I typed a text message—it got too long and I got too bored. I gave up and began hit­ting the auto-sug­gest but­ton when…EUREKA! Where are these seem­ing­ly ran­dom sug­ges­tions com­ing from? Let me col­lab­o­rate with this mag­i­cal robot brain and com­pose a poem. Here’s how I did it. By the way, it’s super-easy, any­one can do it.

First, I opened a chat app and tapped on the mid­dle auto­sug­gest word over and over for two min­utes. I believe the mid­dle sug­ges­tion is the strongest sig­nal from the auto-sug­gest algo­rithm. But real­ly, it doesn’t mat­ter. I just stuck to the same but­ton over and over to iso­late mul­ti­ple vari­ables. After doing this for a few min­utes, it gen­er­at­ed 348 words with­out gram­mar or punc­tu­a­tion (aside from cap­i­tal­iz­ing the ini­tial char­ac­ter):

RAW TEXT: You are a sweet girl but a great day for me to do it and she will always love him so I know that I know what I did and what time I am I know what I did to him and he did it all I did to him I love it and he did what he wants and what he wants me and what he did he wants me and he did what he wants and what I want for me he wants and I know that he is a good per­son I will always love it he is my father he said and I did it and I am a good per­son to know that he did not have a great time he did and I know what he wants and he did what he did to him and I am not sure he wants and he did what he did to him he did what he did and what I want for the way I am he did to him and I am not hap­py he did and what I am not going for he did what he did he was a great per­son he did not have a good time he did not know he did he was not going for the job and did he did what he did to me and I am a great broth­er to me he is my father he is a father of a great day he is my father he is a father of father of the year he is my father he is a great day father he said and I did it all night he said he wants and wants me he said he did he said he was not sure he was the per­son that I am a per­son of and I know that I am not going for a good father and I will not be able he is a great day he is my father he said he wants and wants me he wants to him he wants to be hap­py

Then I spiced it up with a few line breaks, indents, com­mas, and peri­ods here or there…and voilà! This is the “a.i. (with­out the i).” With­out a human hand, we’re regur­gi­tat­ing math—as they say, “Garbage In/Garbage Out.”

You Are a Sweet Girl

There’s all kinds of fun exper­i­ments when it comes to machine learn­ing and <fill-in-the-blank>. Just today I was read­ing an arti­cle in The New York­er about a math­e­mati­cian who built mod­els for invest­ment firms on Wall Street. She quick­ly became dis­il­lu­sioned with her line of work and end­ed up writ­ing Weapons of Math Destruc­tion.

I came across anoth­er instance where a data sci­en­tist fed a ton of pop songs into a data­base, ran an algo­rithm, then had it com­pose a song in the style of The Bea­t­les, or some­thing to that effect. Yet anoth­er focussed on hand­writ­ing, anoth­er on photography—the list goes on an on.

Exper­i­men­ta­tion and play is such a big part of the genre-bend­ing, cross-dis­ci­pline mashups. But hur­ry up and have your fun because I’m pret­ty sure these things won’t age too well.

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