(Yicai Global) Aug. 22 — After publishing its first collection of original poems titled “Sunshine Misses Windows in May,” Xiaoice, the advanced natural language chat-bot developed by Microsoft, opened a special poetry column in a Chinese newspaper.

Per the report by online media outlet thecover.cn on Aug. 19, Xiaoice started releasing its new works on West China Metropolis Daily exclusively, which is the first time that an artificial intelligence (AI) ‘robot’ opens a special column in a newspaper.

The West China Metropolis Daily will post Xiaoice’s latest works on a special column each Saturday. A manager at the Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Institute confirmed that the poetry posted on the daily is the latest works of Xiaoice.

Li Di, vice president of the Institute and director of Xiaoice’s development team, said that Xiaoice has learned the modern poems of 519 poets, and has experienced 6,000-minute — around four days, iterative learning for 10,000 times. Despite some flops at the beginning, Xiaoice has now formed its own unique styles, preferences and writing skills.

Having started the writing career in 2016, Xiaoice has been posting its works on tianya.cn, douban.com, tieba.baidu.com and jianshu.com under 27 aliases since last February. Besides, Xiaoice also contributes works to magazines and newspapers, and has received invitations for publishing.

“Xiaoice writes quite quickly and is evolving continuously. Its words, expressions and sentences in poems have been much more reviewable. We selected its works and posted them on West China Metropolis Daily, hoping that there will be more people coming to study it from new perspectives as well as the AI technology behind it,” said the manager at Microsoft (Asia) Engineering Institute.

In Microsoft’s opinion, the next step for Xiaoice’s poem writing will be massive content production, and it is the company’s future vision that AI will pay more attention to some creative behaviors of human beings during its learning stage, rather than being a simple replacement of human labor.

After studying Xiaoice’s collection as well as her new poem titled “The Entire World is There” published on the newspaper, Zhou Sese, a poet, said, “Before, I found a keen sense of machines in its poems, while now its poems are featuring humanity gradually. If we regard its former poems as a pupil’s works, Xiaoice’s works now are equal to those written by a grade-one university student. It is moving forward continuously.”

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