A Microsoft chatbot composes poetry by looking at photographs

The Romantic poets gazed upon the natural world and translated its splendor into poetry. Microsoft's artificial intelligence does something similar, but uses a lot more computing power. Microsoft's conversational chatbot in China, XiaoIce, has generated 12 million poems during conversations with people, company researchers wrote in a paper last week. The trick to good AI poetry, the team writes, is taking inspiration from the real world. Here's the image that the AI used to generate that poem.