*Might be a happier camper if kept in coronavirus quarantine. On the other hand, I kind of like the honesty of hating the car, the road and every depressing thing she sees while toting all that AI hardware.
Why did it take me three years to find this
AI Poetry Hits the Road
Kenric McDowell
Apr 14, 2017 · 10 min read
The American road novel meets machine learning
I’ve just returned from Ross Goodwin’s AI-assisted stab at the American literary road trip, a project called Wordcar that put AI on the highway to generate 200,000 words of machine poetry. It’s a classic trope with a 21st century twist. But in our moment of tender and anxious global ecological crisis, the free-wheeling ride into the unknown mythologized by Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson takes on a sinister shade. Those authors set out in search of freedom, masculinity, enlightenment, hedonism — 20th century values currently under renovation. These days, hitting the road in a gas-guzzler in search of anything other than a job feels irresponsible or at least unnecessary.
We are where we are. Many aspects of life and the open road have been inexorably transformed by the cannibalistic junkspace of techno-capitalism. The mutation currently on display comes from the revived field of Artificial Intelligence. Because of breakthroughs in neural-net architecture and graphics-processing units, what is called Deep Learning has taken center stage in the field of AI, under the name Machine Learning. The through line from Kerouac to cutting-edge RNN-LSTMs (Recurrent Neural Net Long Short Term Memory) starts with an amphetamine Beat and dips into self-absorbed spiritual utopianism and Gonzo paranoia before it settles in the Bay Area, where dropouts, acid-heads and home-brew hackers laid compost for the home computing revolution and by extension key components in the techno-capitalist stack....
