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

Lessons Learned Inside a Poetry Cage in Buenos Aires

Notes from a performance where an audience became the training loop.

Eat.exe

Drawing a Latent Future with Electric Lines of Desire