About Haiku-Matic
One Billion hAIku
Copyright © 2026 Paul Hodara. All rights reserved.
Haiku-Matic is a free AI haiku generator by Paul Hodara. A compact neural network runs in your browser to create original 5-7-5 haiku, with Space, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter themes and Free, One-thing, Two-part, and Mixed styles.
VERSION
V8.31 · Changes:
Corrections from three rounds of reader review, with the same V8 model.
- A poem names the sun or the stars, not both, because the stars are not visible when the sun is. The moon goes with either.
- On its own, dust does not say space, so a Space poem names something cosmic first: "comets drift through dust".
- Comets, planets, asteroids, meteors and single particles do not expand. Galaxies, particles together and gravity still can.
- Birds and light go over or on a path, not through it. Air and wind do not go through dew, and buds do not drift.
- Ponds, lakes, puddles, streams and water are calm rather than soft, though their waves may be soft.
- A few phrases are gone: "galactic galaxies", "a solar sun", "lit dust" and "a crater is still".
These rules apply to Free, One-thing and Two-part generation. The earlier spring styles and seasonal corrections remain.
ABOUT THESE HAIKU
Every haiku here is one of over a billion that Haiku-Matic can generate. Its home is haiku-matic.com.
How it was made. Every haiku here is written by a tiny language model, 28.9 million parameters, first trained on children's stories and small enough to run on a microcontroller, and here in your browser. On its own it wrote broken, story-like English. So it went back to school. A much larger model, Qwen, wrote 5,000 example haiku under strict rules, and later about 5,000 more, written by Claude and checked by hand, became its training set. Training works by backpropagation: each time the model guesses the next word wrongly, the error is traced back through the network and every weight is nudged so the guess is a little less wrong. The training was also quantization-aware: it simulated rounding the weights to 4 bits as it went, so the model learned to work at the tiny size it is shipped in. Even so, the model only suggests the next word. Hand-made rules decide which words are allowed, so every haiku is exactly 5-7-5, in whole sentences. Many of those rules came from volunteer reviewers in the Haiku Lab, who rated and annotated poems line by line. Each recurring complaint, such as “sounds too much like astronomy class”, became a new rule, tested on thousands of poems before it was released.
INSTRUCTIONS
- Menu bar
- The bar at the top hides after a few seconds. Move the mouse, tap or scroll to bring it back.
- Theme
- Space, Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter, or All themes to take turns. Changing it starts the crawl again with the new theme.
- Style
- Free: each line is chosen on its own. One-thing: every line stays with one idea, such as a black hole, falling snow, falling leaves, blossoms or bees in a garden. Two-part: two images set side by side, such as wind in the pines and a still pond. Mixed: one of the three at random for each poem. The styles are written for one theme at a time, so choosing one with All themes sets the theme to Space. In Spring, One-thing and Two-part poems have no written first line: the generator writes it, naming the poem's idea (blossoms, buds, rain, streams or birds).
- Link
- The address keeps the theme and style, so a copied link opens the page the same way: ?theme=spring&style=two-part at the end of the address, for example. The theme is all, space, spring, summer, autumn or winter, and the style is free, one-thing, two-part or mixed.
- Reading view / Play crawl
- Reading view stops the crawl and lists the poems so you can scroll through them, with Write another to add one more. Play crawl starts the crawl again. Esc also switches to the reading view.
- Pause / Resume
- Stops and restarts the crawl and the music.
- Speed
- How fast the crawl moves, from 0.5× to 4×.
- Music
- Shakuhachi music. It is off until you turn it on here.
- Stars
- The star field on or off.
CREDITS AND LICENSES
Invited Haiku Lab reviewers. Much of the rule development came from poems rated and annotated in the Haiku Lab by volunteer reviewers.
Thank you – Paul Hodara
Third-party components are used under their own licenses, listed below. They are not covered by the reservation of rights above.
Base language model and tokenizer. esp32-ai-tinystories, Copyright © 2026 Viacheslav Sierbov. Used and modified under the MIT License.
Training data of the base model. TinyStories, Ronen Eldan and Yuanzhi Li, Microsoft Research (2023), arXiv:2305.07759. Licensed under the Community Data License Agreement – Sharing, Version 1.0 (CDLA-Sharing-1.0). The dataset is not redistributed here.
Music. Araki Kodō III, Shika no Tōne (shakuhachi), Victor 13029, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.