In very depressing news, according to a study published in Nature, readers struggle to distinguish between poetry written by some of the greatest human poets of all time and poems generated by AI chatbots like ChatGPT that churn out unoriginal trash cobbled together from the collected works of some of the greatest human poets of all time.
Not only that, but the study suggests that people prefer the AI poetry that’s just a randomized remix of stuff good poets have already written, possibly due to the text being clearer to understand and more simply written. Some involved in the study found the more complex rhyme schemes and verse structures of actual poets difficult to understand.
Videos by VICE
Led by Brian Porter at Pittsburgh University, the study involved analyzing poems from 10 of the most beloved English-language poets. Some of the big names included Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The Avengers of English-language poetry. The stuff that has been read and studied for centuries and will be read and studied for centuries more.
The researchers told ChatGPT 3.5 to write poems in the style of these legendary poets and then asked 2,300 study participants to determine which poems were written by humans and which were written by AI.
The results were a little bizarre but people generally favored AI versions of the works of famous poets over the actual works of those famous poets. They seem to prefer the remix to the original, in other words.
In one experiment, the participants were more likely to attribute AI-generated poems to human authors while the human poems were misidentified as AI. In another experiment, wherein the participants were asked to rate the poems, the AI poems received higher scores, as the participants found them more emotionally resonant.
This, according to the study authors, suggests that AI poems are more accessible and easier to understand, while human poems, some of which were written hundreds of years ago, were at times so incoherent to modern readers that the only logical conclusion was that they had to have been written by AI.
AI simplified the language just enough that modern readers felt more connected to it. When the participants were presented with the abstraction and complexity of human-created poetry, they viewed it as AI mucking things up with its weird stilted language.
So, to me, it doesn’t necessarily seem like people in this study prefer AI poetry over human poetry as much as they appreciate that AI wrote poetry in a more modern tongue that they could understand. I don’t imagine there are too many poets out there writing like Shakespeare or Chaucer nowadays, who wrote in older versions of the English language that are all but dead today.
