IlluSonnet: Using Generative AI to Create Illustrations for Sonnets

Poetry evokes imagery, and writers and readers alike desire to translate the artful wordplay to a beautiful image. To facilitate this process, we built IlluSonnet, a system that creates illustrations for poetry using text-to-image generative AI models. IlluSonnet works by labelling keywords, emotional qualities, and most related artistic style for the given sonnet before prompting DALL-E for an image. To evaluate IlluSonnet, we both ran a user study to assess the quality of the output images as well as the overall interface. Our study indicates that IlluSonnet helped users generate images that illustrated the sonnets well and that the process of creating and seeing imagery alongside the poem helped users understand the sonnets in a new light. We conclude by discussing how IlluSonnet can be used to further facilitate a deeper connection between both art and poetry.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Chen, Tiffany

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mueller, Stefanie

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/152797

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/152797