About Singulars

Singulars is a series of live poetry performances where a human poet duels a machine. Each performance pits original human poems against AI-generated counterparts on shared themes, and the audience votes to decide the winner.

The project explores the boundary between human creativity and machine generation. Can a language model capture the nuance, emotion, and craft of a human poet? Can an audience tell the difference? Singulars puts these questions to the test in a live, participatory format.

Each performance uses a different AI model, trained or fine-tuned on poetry. The audience votes are collected and used to further train the machine for the next round—a form of artisanal RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback)—creating a feedback loop between human taste and machine output.

Singulars is created by Halim Madi.


Further Reading

Eat.exe

Drawing a Latent Future with Electric Lines of Desire

On Poetry and Machines

Exploring what happens when algorithms write verse.

The Training Loop

How audience votes shape the next generation of machine poetry.

Behind the Performances

What it’s like to compete against an AI on stage.