Review on an “Untranslatable” Book

Can AI write poems? – That’s the starting point of an AI project named after renowned Japanese poet Issa Kobayashi. It was developed by a team of researchers at Hokkaido University with the aim to study AI’s feasibility in the world of creative writing.

 You can now read their interesting journey in a book called 人工知能が俳句を詠む: AI一茶くんの挑戦 (my tentative translation “Haiku Writing by Artificial Intelligence: Challenge by AI Poet “Issa-kun”).
Although the book contains lots of poems, it is more of a scientific read that gives you a good overview of the impressive gains AI has made through big data and deep learning.

It seems to me that the biggest challenge lies in the fact that an AI poet cannot judge if his or her works are good or not. The final selection from a pool of AI-generated poems is done by humans, specifically by skilled human poets. True, AI can at times produce unexpected - seemingly revolutionary – word combinations. But it is humans who see any value in such unconventionality. In the book, the author addresses the problem of the “never-ending quest for a strong AI”.

After all, AI has no will to convey a message. When feeling touched by poems, we inevitably sense the existence of humans behind them who want to share their feeling or impressions of the world. We cannot feel this empathy with a mechanism that just juggles big data stocks.

The book was freshly published in July this year and has not yet been translated into other languages - for a good reason: it is simply untranslatable!

It contains lots of dull and half-witted poems produced by AI. To visualize the aesthetic growth of the AI poet, a human translator would have to recreate the different degrees of stupidity of the original poems in their work as per the GIGA principle. But it is our nature as translators that we always want to translate things as well as we can.

For my Japanese-literate friends:
Let me quote a titbit from the book.

見返りの　うしろや寂し　秋の風
病む人の　うしろ姿や　秋の風

One of the above poems was written by Matsuo Basho, the grandmaster of Haiku and the other by AI. Can you tell which is which? You will find the answer in the book.