Can an AI chatbot write good poetry? I asked that question to a chatbot and it gave me a reasonably honest answer.
"While AI chatbots can technically write poetry, it's generally considered that they cannot produce truly "good" poetry in the sense of being deeply creative, emotionally resonant, or exhibiting the nuanced understanding of the human experience that is often associated with great poetry; however, they can generate poems that appear well-structured and follow traditional forms, particularly when given specific prompts and stylistic guidelines."
I have been reading several articles about experiments with having people read poems written by AI and ones written by actual poets - famous and not well known - and reporting their likes and dislikes.
The researchers told different groups different things (all poems are from humans; all poems are AI; they could be either), and that, as a friend pointed out, opens the experiment up to confirmation biases. That some preferred AI poems to human poems is not surprising depending on which poems they were shown. A Shakespeare sonnet is not a favorite of many people and the language is off-putting to modern readers, so a simply written poem by AI might get the thumbs up.
What do you think of this short poem?
Oh, how I revel in this world, this life that we are given,
This tapestry of experiences, that shapes us into living,
And though I may depart, my spirit will still sing,
The song of life eternal, that flows through everything.
AI or human?
That’s ChatGPT writing in the style of Walt Whitman's “I Sing the Body Electric.” It sounds Whitmanesque, though the rhyme is rather awkward.
AI follows poems that exist out there and have been gobble up in their databases. I don't think AI could do much better than this famous Whitman passage from his continually revised Leaves of Grass.
That you are here — that life exists,
That the powerful play goes on,
and you may contribute a verse.
- Leaves of Grass (1892)
Some researchers asked ChatGPT to create five poems in the style of 10 different English language poets, all white. Then, they asked more than 1,600 people to read five real poems by one of the poets, alongside the five AI-generated poems. People were bad at predicting which poems were written by AI and which were human, Maybe they should have asked some poets to compare.
As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult, and one study found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. They theorized that AI-generated poetry was preferred by readers because it was simpler and more accessible. They posit that general readers may have misinterpreted the complexity of human-written poems as garble generated by AI.
But AI poetry has some issues. AI lacks lived experience, a personal perspective, and uman emotion. Because AI generates text by identifying patterns in large datasets, which can lead to predictable and repetitive phrasing in poems. Metaphors and symbolism often require a deeper understanding of language and human experience than most AI models currently possess.
An AI's strength in writing poetry improves as it learns poetic structures and experiments with different rhyme schemes and forms to generate variations.
I find that AI used for brainstorming ideas and getting inspiration for a poem by prompting with a theme or concept is interesting. It can also be used for educational purposes, such as demonstrating how language can be manipulated to create poetic effects.
MORE AT
phys.org/news/2024-11-shakespeare-chatgpt-people-ai-real.html
washingtonpost.com/science/2024/11/14/chatgpt-ai-poetry-study-creative
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