Full Title: “Poetry by History’s Greatest Poets or AI? People Can’t Tell the Difference—and Even Prefer the Latter. What Gives? (via Singularity Hub)”
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 GPT-3.5 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” 10 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 10 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 a scale of 1 to 100.
A second group of participants was exposed to three different scenarios. Some were told that all the poems they were given were human. Some were told they were reading only AI poems. Some were not told anything.
They were then presented with five human and five AI poems and asked to rank them on a seven point scale, from extremely bad to extremely good. The participants who were told nothing were also asked to guess whether each poem was human or AI.
The researchers found that AI poems scored higher than their human-written counterparts in attributes such as “creativity,” “atmosphere,” and “emotional quality.”
The AI “Plath” poem quoted above is one of those included in the study, set against several she actually wrote.
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Links:
Singularity Hub | Nature Scientific Reports
