Allison Parrish

22 Compasses is a collection of poems written with a machine learning model of spelling and phonetics. The model invents new words in negative spaces between supposedly discrete categories.

The Poems

22 Compasses

2019-2021
AI-Generated Poetry

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The Process

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Data set used: In English, there isn’t a straightforward relationship between the way words are spelled and the way they’re pronounced. The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary is a freely available online database of English words and their phonetic transcriptions. This dataset was used to train a machine learning model that can sound out words from their spelling and spell out arbitrary sounds, even if they’re not “real words” in the dictionary.

Technology used: Keras was the primary machine learning framework, making it easy to create a bespoke sequence-to-sequence model called Pincelate that “translates” from letters to phoneme features. The poems themselves are generated with Python code that makes use of this model to blend together and spell the sounds of two or more words.

How AI is used: The hidden state of a machine learning model for predicting phonemes from spelling is manipulated, making it possible to generate new nonsense words with particular characteristics.

About Allison Parrish

Allison is a computer programmer, poet, educator, and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned her master's degree in 2008.

Named "Best Maker of Poetry Bots" by The Village Voice in 2016, Allison's computer-generated poetry has recently been published in BOMB Magazine and Nioques. She’s also the author of @Everyword: The Book (Instar, 2015), which collects the output of her popular long-term automated writing project that tweeted every word in the English language. The word game, Rewordable, designed by Allison in collaboration with Adam Simon and Tim Szetela, was published by Penguin Random House in August 2017 after a successful round of Kickstarter funding. Her first full-length book of computer-generated poetry, Articulations, was published by Counterpath in 2018.

Allison is originally from West Bountiful, Utah and currently lives in Brooklyn.

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Featured Sessions

Using AI to Shape the Language of a Generation

Our stories are passed down through generations, but what if those stories are passed through neural models instead of people? Join a discussion of how language in the age of AI takes on new forms and tells new stories. Artists Stephanie Dinkins and Pindar Van Arman and poet Allison Parrish share how the language of AI has shaped their artwork and their creative process.

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A reading of Generated Poetry

Enjoy the whimsy of poetry composed by Allison Parrish using machine learning models.

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