Show HN: AI World News Poetry
newspoem.vercel.appI 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. This is great! Did you scrape whole articles as input, or was the poem formed just through the headlines? 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. very elegant!