Australian digital artist Pierre Proske is working with researchers at the Viktoria Institute in Sweden to develop intelligent fridge magnets that fix bad grammar and change the words to something they think is more appropriate.

Each fridge magnet consists of 16-character liquid crystal display. The prototypes can randomly generate a word, categorise that word (as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb) and transmit the category to any words they are placed next to.

As you compose a poem, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules. Once they are “trained”, the magnets can “autocorrect” words that don’t fit the established grammar rules. If you don’t like the word the magnet substitutes, you can shake the magnet to reshuffle and get a new word.

The system won’t be too strict about the grammar of the sentence as a whole. “This was deliberate to keep the sentences a little more poetic,” says Proske. “We don’t want to create sentences that make total sense.”

The team also hopes that the magnets will be able to substitute words in response to other stimuli. For example, someone might have a set of magnets on the home fridge and another set on the work fridge that can communicate via wireless internet. If the magnets at home read, say, “Crazy kangaroos dream wildly”, those at work might change to “Drunk wallabies laze around the pool”, in keeping with the Australian theme.

Developed by Kavita Thomas, Pierre Proske and Mattias Rickardsson.

Via ABC news.