Can AI Write Poetry?
In a recent study, people liked poems written by artificial intelligence better than those written by humans.
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Is ChatGPT a better poet than William Shakespeare?
If great poetry comes from the heart, it makes sense to assume that artificial intelligence (AI) can’t write a decent poem. But in a recent study, many participants preferred AI-generated poetry to verses written by even the world’s greatest human poets.
The study used the AI chatbot known as ChatGPT. Created by a company called OpenAI, ChatGPT analyzes content and then learns to create its own content. For example, it can learn to write poetry by analyzing poems written by humans and then mimicking the poets’ writing styles.
In the study, researchers asked ChatGPT to generate poems in the style of some of the world’s best English-language writers. These included Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg. Then the researchers asked 1,634 study participants to read 10 poems. Five of the poems were written by a human poet, and the other five were written by ChatGPT in the same style as that human poet.
The researchers asked the participants which poems were written by humans, and only 46 percent of the responses were correct.
Next, the researchers gathered 696 new participants and asked them to read 14 poems and rate each one. Some of these poems had been written by humans, and others had been created by AI. But the participants weren’t told this. Instead, one-third of the participants were told that a chatbot had generated all the poems. Another third were told a human had written them. The remaining third were not told anything about who created the poems.
The participants who thought the poems were written by humans rated them more highly than the group who thought the chatbot was the author. Researchers expected this to be the case.
What researchers did not expect had to do with the group that didn’t know who or what had written the poems. These participants gave higher ratings to the poems that had been written by the chatbot!
Even though ChatGPT is good at copying writers’ styles, it turns out that AI-generated poetry just isn’t the same as poems written by talented humans. Researchers say that among the poems they used in their study, the AI poetry was simpler and more straightforward than the human poetry. That may be why some study participants seemed to like it better.
