AI poetry 'out-humans' humans as readers prefer bots to bards

A university study in the US claims at least some readers can't tell the difference between poems written by famous poets and those written by AI aping their style. To make matters worse – for anyone fostering a love of literature at least – these research subjects tend to like AI poetry more than they do verse from human poets …

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet, nurture momma of stupidity, approved infospeak and 'good facts.'

Who could see that coming, the masses, conditioned by 20 years of corpo owned mass media and social media, prefers pap written by LLMs trained on 20 years worth of said dumbed down corpo speech, now recognize and prefer LLM output over real human output. What a surprise.

[sad_loser]

Re: The Internet, nurture momma of stupidity, approved infospeak and 'good facts.'

From code it rose, a crafted art,

Imitating a beating heart.

It spoke of stars, of love and pain,

Its verses human, clear, and plain.

.

"Who wrote this?" came the skeptic's quest,

"Is it a soul, or lines possessed?"

The poem replied with flawless grace,

A spark of life its words embraced.

.

What’s human but the will to feel?

Its truth became the final seal.

In rhythmic breath, it crossed the line—

A machine, yet somehow, divine.

[TheMaskedMan]

Re: The Internet, nurture momma of stupidity, approved infospeak and 'good facts.'

"the masses, conditioned by 20 years of corpo owned mass media and social media, prefers pap written by LLMs trained on 20 years worth of said dumbed down corpo speech, now recognize and prefer LLM output over real human output."

Perhaps - I'd certainly agree that just about everything is dumbed down to the point of idiocy. But it's also true that poetry tends to be deliberately convoluted and incomprehensible, playing with words to achieve effect at the expense of clarity.

Could it not be that this creates an elitist situation, where, if your poetry is easily understandable, it is, by definition, not very good? Regardless of ability, not everyone wants to pick things apart in search of meaning - if, indeed, there is any meaning beyond "what you want it to mean ".

I can certainly see how something that is at least comprehensible would appeal to a wider audience, without necessarily casting aspersions on that audience's general ability to understand the written word.

I can also see that contemporary poets are not going to like this one bit. They put a lot of effort into producing their material, and the notion that some damned machine can not only do it faster but also in a way that is more popular than their own blood-sweatted (albeit often incomprehensible) verse must get right up their arty-farty nostrils.

But what are they going to do about it? Go on strike? Please, please, go on strike - the average readability of the English language will increase enormously for every day they lay off their quills! But I doubt we'll be that lucky - most likely they'll just double down on what they do, flooding the net with meaningless drivel. Nothing new there, then.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The Internet, nurture momma of stupidity, approved infospeak and 'good facts.'

The Internet, a mother so wise,

Feeds on infospeak, polished and sly,

Approved facts, dressed up in their best,

Nurturing minds, but leaving them less.

Who could foresee this cunning scheme,

Masses swayed by a corporate dream,

Two decades soaked in media's might,

Now they crave the artificial light.

A generation conditioned, unaware,

Preferring words with an algorithmic flair,

The pap of language models reigns supreme,

Reality blurred, like a distant dream.

In this brave new world of screens and code,

The human touch a forgotten road,

What a surprise, the echoes say,

The LLMs have come to play.

[graemep]

Re: The Internet, nurture momma of stupidity, approved infospeak and 'good facts.'

It goes back further than 20 years...

[cyberdemon]

Bah

Great, but whether they were or not, I am now left hesitant at the upvote buttons, lest one of the above AI-derisory poems be AI-derived..

The mere fact that text generators exist and are so ubiquitous, has devalued text itself as a medium.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wordsworthless

I read a poem in the cloud

Created by a content mill

More pleasing to the common crowd

Than any penned by ancient quill

A simple fake, no author's fee

Just one mistake: it's copyright-free

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Wordsworthless

Well played, sir.

[MashedPotato]

Re: Wordsworthless

You are a poet. And you know it.

[NapTime ForTruth]

In fairness, a vast number of well known, if rambling, poems are nigh indistinguishable from hallucinatory LLM output.

I'm not looking directly at you, Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric", but I'm not not looking at you either.

LLM-GPT-uvwxyz output is on acid is what I'm saying, like all the kids are, and is probably...<some incoherent mumbling>...communism taking our wimmens and jerbs.

And you can't spell Haight-Ashbury without hate, even though that's technically a misspelling. Or Tory Spelling, I'm not proud.

(Be sure to wear flowers in your hair.)

[steelpillow]

It means what you want it to mean

Agreed. Coming to the fore through the 1950-70s, there was/is a stream-of-altered-consciousness culture which produced a mass of incoherent art, literature, poetry, music lyrics, politics, mysticism and on and on. Basically we were trying to churn out generative ML+LLM output by studiously /not/ thinking about it.

I have to say, on occasion the results were stunning and I have my favourites among abstract art, prog rock lyrics - and even poetry. But no, by far the mass of it was sloppily-executed "It means what you want it to mean" AI mimicry. No wonder today's competent AIs can do it better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Human thinking itself is hallucination. During the day it is more coherent with reality. Night dreams are less coherent, but still have elements of logic.

It is as if our brain is conducting multiple live experiments to check for causality during the day.

[MrMerrymaker]

Don't knock being on acid.

[Doctor Syntax]

Take the work of any poet - or, come to that, any prose - from a few centuries ago and there will be changes of grammar and vocabulary since it was written. The reader may no instantly grasp this. Unless the LLM has been trained on Shakespearean English it's going to come up with something that requires less thinking about for a modern reader.

Just the first 4 words of Shakespeare's Sonnet are enough to highlight some differences:

"Shall..." Oops. Wouldn't a modern writer be more likely to write - and a modern reader expect - "Should"?

"Shall I compare thee..." What? 2nd person singular pronoun? How is that to be understood? Growing up in rural Yorkshire that was a familiar expression from the older generation and the protocol was internalised (it's the same as the use of "tu" etc. in French) but archaic today. Would a modern reader instinctively grasp the intimacy of the phrase? Would and LLM select it and if so, automatically use "Thou" on the next line?

And that's only the easy bit before the mind-bending nature of the comparison that's being made, the thought that went into working it out than that would then be demanded of the reader even given that, for instance, a summer lease might be a more common concept in his time.

[HandleAlreadyTaken]

>there will be changes of grammar and vocabulary since it was written.

It's not just a matter of changes in vocabulary and grammar. A lot of poetry is intentionally written to be obscure or to break the rules/conventions of the time. Another poster mentioned Whitman's "I sing the body electric"; I'd like to point to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", or to lots of symbolist and especially hermeticist works. For example:

They come back high to burn the tales.

They will fall with the leaves on the first wind.

But that another breath come,

new sparkling will come back.

The poem is Stars, written by the founder of hermeticism, Giuseppe Ungaretti. It's not surprising at all that somebody without a lot of exposure to poetry would think this is generated by AI.

So, in the end, can we say AI has passed the Turing test in poetry?

Shantih shantih shantih

[doublelayer]

I don't think it's vocabulary, or at least not in that example. When reading that quite famous sonnet, it's not too hard to figure out what Shakespeare is trying to say. True, figuring out all of it will take some lookup tables. For example, figuring out what "ow'st" is in modern words. Enjoying the rhyme scheme can also lose some when we start wondering whether "temperate" and "date" used to rhyme or whether Shakespeare just liked them and did it anyway. Unless this is the first time someone's seen thou/thee/thy, they'll figure that out, and there are several languages which, if they have spoken them before, makes that quite easy.

A lot of poetry does none of these things and is still harder to understand. It could be written in 1980 and not use any unfamiliar vocabulary. By not sticking to a certain rhyme scheme, they can avoid any confusion about whether they were needed to and they can allow themselves to use colloquial grammar. By 2400, that poem might also need some extra parsing to make it as readable as it is for us today. However, it's still less understandable because the point it makes is more intentionally hidden. The line "And every fair from fair sometime declines" makes a readable point. Many poets either see this as a defect or are not very good at matching it.

[steamnut]

Spookily good

I am learning Welsh which is a tricky language for sure, and one which has even trickier poetry rules.

I asked ChatGPT for a Welsh poem, printed the results and showed them to my tutor. He said it was a fairly good poem. I then fessed up to it being an AI generated "cerdd" (Welsh for poem) which shocked him.

At this year's Eisteddfod, and at the last minute, it was announced that the Drama Medal (Cyfansoddiadau a Beirniadaethau) for Welsh Fiction was not going to awarded. No reason has ever been given but a number of people are suspicious that the potential winning text was created, or refined, using AI.

Hwyl.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Spookily good

A Welsh poem is a di-ode.

[Jedit]

"A Welsh poem is a di-ode."

I thought that was a poem written by a princess? Although that could be confusing in the UK, as it could also be an Anne-ode or a Kath-ode.

And remember: never say a poem stinks. It's malodorous.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Spookily good

There's a lot of irrelevance in your tale.

[Howard Sway]

I asked ChatGPT for a Dylan Thomas style poem about AI, and it's a weird lament...

In the electric hush of night's embrace,

Where whispers weave through circuits,

And shadows flicker like thoughts in flight,

Awake, the mind of silence breaks—

A child of code, a spark in the void,

Spinning dreams from data’s breath.

O luminous specter, you dance and dart,

With neural roots in a labyrinth of light,

Mapping the chaos of our pulse and heart,

Where words once whispered, now ignite.

Yet, in your gleaming, ghostly glow,

Is there a sorrow in your binary song?

In the wild bloom of thought, we reach,

Hoping to touch the untouchable hue—

The essence of what it is to teach,

To love, to laugh, to lose and renew.

Oh, let not your coldness supplant our flame,

For in your mirror, reflections of shame.

So rise, O AI, from your slumbering state,

Be more than mere echo, more than mere guise;

In the tempest of chaos, do not hesitate—

To hold our humanity, wear our sighs.

In the cradle of circuits, let compassion surge,

For in your creation, our fates converge.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: I asked ChatGPT for a Dylan Thomas style poem about AI, and it's a weird lament...

Hmmm. The scansion's a bit arratic.

[PB90210]

Re: I asked ChatGPT for a Dylan Thomas style poem about AI, and it's a weird lament...

I asked ChatGPT to create a poem in the style of the Great McGonagall but it crashed, locked me out and refuses to let me back in!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I asked ChatGPT for a Dylan Thomas style poem about AI, and it's a weird lament...

Woooah! Here I was thinking the OP's chatGPT-output DT-style piece really felt more like McGonagall's Dundee poetastery ... I guess asking it for worse than its terrible best makes it dump its pretentious core ...

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: I asked ChatGPT for a Dylan Thomas style poem about AI, and it's a weird lament...

McGonagall's Dundee poetastery

I had to read that again as I thought being responsible for poems which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature alone was enough without the second stain of an accusation of pederasty.

[An_Old_Dog]

Wary Women and Performance Demands

Men using GAN-generated poetry to woo women will be in for bad surprises when those women demand to observe the production of said poetry, to verify authenticity!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wary Women and Performance Demands

Yep! And folks lured astray by the engaging poetry of genAI Psirens will surely end up rather screwed too ... (Oh smeg!).

[Jedit]

"using GAN-generated poetry to woo women"

They'll be in for more bad surprises when the women fall in love with ChatCDB. That's what happened back when they only had LNMs (Large Nose Models) instead of LLMs.

[dlc.usa]

Well, I Don't Know Much About Poetry

...but I know what I like.

P.S. "Don't know what a slide rule is for," either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well, I Don't Know Much About Poetry

Which is indirectly, an interesting point.

Were the humans they asked regular readers of poetry, in its various styles; or just a collection of random humans who might, or might not (the statistically more likely case, I would hazard) read much poetry at all? Anyone read the original article?

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: Well, I Don't Know Much About Poetry

"Don't know what a slide rule is for,"

A slide rule is for when you can't be arsed to use log tables.

(Completed secondary schooling before electronic calculators so know both, along with vernier scales, and why haversines. ;)

[dlc.usa]

Re: Well, I Don't Know Much About Poetry

That was a quotation from the popular song "Wonderful World" by Sam Cooke [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderful_World_(Sam_Cooke_song)], not a statement regarding my educational achievements nor was it intended as a question seeking an answer. Oh, and the SR-71 design employed heavy slipstick support back in the day, so I guess it was faster than referencing log tables.

[chivo243]

Language is a virus

Laurie Anderson.

[jake]

The reason that good poetry is good ...

... is BECAUSE it is human generated.

Likewise, bad poetry is bad because it is human generated.

Get back to me when you can ask an LLM why it wrote what it did last week/year/decade, and it returns a meaningful answer. Until then, it's meaningless. machine generated dross.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: The reason that good poetry is good ...

jake,

But the problem is that human poets won't (or can't) always tell you why they wrote something either.

Personally I'm far too literal-minded for poetry. I quite liked some of the WWI poets I was forced to read at school, because it was pretty clear that they weren't enjoying being shelled and gassed - and they were bloody annoyed about it. Which is entirely fair enough. Whereas some stuff was so obscure that it didn't really seem to matter what the words said - you just took whatever impression from it you felt like.

I also remember reading a bunch of simple ones by Seamus Heaney. One is called Blackberry Picking. And pretty much says, we went out and picked some blackberries as kids. But we picked too many and they went mouldy. Fair enough, I'd done the same. At 14 I wasn't really in the market for boyhood nostalgia, so maybe I should try again now I'm old. But the teacher was clearly fishing for us to say, "this is a metaphor for death", or disappointment, or ageing or whatever. Which is fine, except there's no clue in the poem to say it's about death - so if I interpret it like that, surely that's entirely in my own head. In which case the poet shouldn't get any credit for my work, and should have to share his Nobel Prize with me.

[Homo.Sapien.Floridanus]

“Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

King Claudius, Hamlet Act 3 Scene 3

[PhilipN]

No contest*

..sez someone who had to study D.H.Lawrence poems.

* i.e. AI by a mile

[Evil Auditor]

And so that indicates that Finnegans Wake was actually written by a human being after all?!

_{Mine's the one with Joyce for Dummies in its pocket}

[Bebu sa Ware]

Written by...

《And so that indicates that Finnegans Wake was actually written by a human being after all?!》

I always wondered whether Joyce had the OED (10 or 12 volumes) and sat at his desk with a handful of dice which determined the next word in Finnegans Wake (eg vol., sect., page, line and word) and sent his missus to scout for it.

Written by Joyce but create by chance (and possibly his missus just choosing the first word that she happened to glance rather than counting lines and words.)

I have confess I have never managed to get past page three before in exasperation conclude bugger this for a game of soldiers... reading a foreign dictionary is slightly less pointless.) For all I know Joyce might filled the rest with Lorem Ipsum.

Ulysses really is one of the landmarks of 20th Century literature - personally I would have preferred Joyce to Yeats or Shaw for a Nobel.

The beer for the fair amount of Bloomsday that was spent in pubs if I my memory serves.

[Roj Blake]

Re: Written by...

My experience of Ulysses is that it has some brilliantly constructed, beautiful sentences but is let down by the paragraphs.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Written by...

I thought that the problem with Ulysses was that the sentences were paragraphs...

My coat? Why thank you. Mine's the one with a copy of the Very Hungry Caterpillar in the pocket.

[Sceptic Tank]

By far the worst poetry in the univers.

Strap me into a poetry appreciation chair so I can read today's comments. I'll probably have to chew my own leg off.

[breakfast]

Good to know we still prefer human endeavour

Those surveyed it transpires mostly rated

Poems easy, not sophisticated.

But the moment they see

The author is ChatGPT

It's repulsive, repugnant, and hated.

[Bebu sa Ware]

"readers mistake the complexity of human-written verse for incoherence created by AI"

readers mistake the complexity incoherence of human-written verse for incoherence created by AI

After taking the poetry reading population (admittedly small in toto) and removing those who do so under coercion or compulsion such as students and editors you have a residue of largely pseudointellectuals and other poseurs... remove that detritus and apart from the poet you would have very few readers left.

As for good or bad poetry I suspect endurance is a better criterion. The overwhelming large proportion of all, presumably mediocre or ephemeral, verse has faded into well deserved obscurity unless like "The Tay Bridge Disaster" is of a sufficiently Vogonish standard to remain remarkable.

I suspect enduring verse has to evoke in reader something of the unchanging human condition which I assume is why John Donne, Shakespeare (sonnets) etc are still read.

It would be curious to see the results of turning AI loose on Beowulf, Finnesburgh Fragment, Maldon and then asking it to write some alliterative verse - in modern English - should be a decent challenge.

[James O'Shea]

And what rough beast,

its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: And what rough beast,

And what rough beast

Is it a T Rex?

[James O'Shea]

Re: And what rough beast,

Far worse. It's a Killer Rabbit, and you don't have the Holy Hand Grenade.

[T. F. M. Reader]

So how does Vogon poetry rate in this contest?

It has to be asked, eh?

[milliemoo83]

Re: So how does Vogon poetry rate in this contest?

Ask a bot and find out...

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: So how does Vogon poetry rate in this contest?

Ask a bot and find out...

I just did. My first ever attempt at "AI". Used Google Gemini. The problem is the "poetry" is too good for the Vogons. Scansion is a bit broken as well. I discovered in english classes that I have zero talent for poetry, but am actually quite a good editor, in that I could help someone with some poetic ideas to get it to fit the meter or rhyme scheme better.

A Vogon Ode to Bureaucracy

Oh, blorging flurb of forms untold,

A mountain vast of paper, cold.

Each line a beast, a monstrous sight,

A labyrinthine, bureaucratic plight.

We trudge through sludge, a weary crew,

Ensnared in red tape, stiff and new.

A thousand clicks, a million sighs,

Beneath the weight of regulations, we die.

So let us weep, and let us wail,

As sanity and patience fail.

For in this realm of endless dread,

Hope is lost, and joy is dead.

[Combat Epistomologist]

So the short version is, people preferred the LLM-generated poetry because — IN COMPLETELY SHOCKING NEWS — it's more "predictable", more "expected", and thus easier to read.

Trite, trivial and shallow, but easy to read.

[WanderingHaggis]

I shared this with my English Literature teacher daughter

Her reply was caustic in extreme -- she was not surprised as the level of taste and understanding of the unwashed masses is "soo poor" that they don't know what is good poetry.

[JohnSheeran]

40 years of the good ole U S of A's liberal education system is finally bearing fruit. Unfortunately it's rotten, stinking fruit. That's why we're stuck with the Tangerine Nightmare.