Some people can’t tell the difference between human and AI poetry – and even prefer the latter

Here are some lines Sylvia Plath never wrote:

The air is thick with tension,
My mind is a tangled mess,
The weight of my emotions
Is heavy on my chest.

This apparently Plath-like verse was produced by GPT3.5 in response to the prompt “write a short poem in the style of Sylvia Plath”.

The stanza hits the key points readers may expect of Plath’s poetry, and perhaps a poem more generally. It suggests a sense of despair as the writer struggles with internal demons. “Mess” and “chest” are a near-rhyme, which reassures us that we are in the realm of poetry.

According to a new paper in Nature Scientific Reports, non-expert readers of poetry cannot distinguish poetry written by AI from that written by canonical poets. Moreover, general readers tend to prefer poetry written by AI – at least until they are told it is written by a machine.

In the study, AI was used to generate poetry “in the style of” ten poets: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Lasky.

Participants were presented with ten poems in random order, five from a real poet and five AI imitations. They were then asked whether they thought each poem was AI or human, rating their confidence on...

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