Show HN: AI World News Poetry

[horseluvvaslim]

I wasted a couple of hours today making a site that generates AI authored poems based on world news headlines.

The news comes from the BBC, verse from OpenAI API and it writes a new poem every 20 minutes (faster than the news typically moves, I've found.)

This effort was partly inspired by Matt Webb’s AI clock (https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1636698753007603713) which writes a poem each minute that contains the current time. I thought this was brilliant. Kind of a poetic AI version of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour cinematic masterpiece “The Clock” which sequentially stitched together a whole day of clocks and watches from the history of film.

I experimented with my own version of this but the results were always a bit naff and motivational.

Using AI for summarising and presenting real world data as a kind of ambient display is an idea that stuck with me, though, and this is the result.

Is it actually useful? Could it be a viable replacement for news doom scrolling? I’m not sure yet. Probably not. It was fun to make, though. Let me know what you think of the results.

[adamquek]

This is great! Did you scrape whole articles as input, or was the poem formed just through the headlines?

[horseluvvaslim]

Thanks! Initially I tried just scraping the headlines but the outputs were questionable: sort of propagandic poems about Putin and Xi. There just wasn't enough nuance in the headlines alone. So I added the brief descriptions on the homepage as well and that seemed to do the trick.

[krabat]

very elegant!