When it comes to writing poetry, it seems that artificial intelligence (AI) triumphs over humans. AI chatbots can mimic famous poems written by icons like William Shakespeare well enough to fool many human readers.
New research has shown that readers cannot tell the difference between AI-generated and human-written poetry. In addition, they are more likely to prefer AI poems over the works of renowned writers.
People’s tendency to rate chatbot-produced poetry positively may be because of its simplicity and straightforward images and themes. The complexity of human-written verse goes over their heads and might be mistaken for incoherence.
Researchers asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT to create poems in the style of well-known authors such as Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsburg, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare.
Then, they instructed 1,634 study participants to read 10 poems to test their ability to distinguish between AI-generated poetry and human-written poetry. Five poems were written by a human poet, and five were written by the chatbot in the style of genuine poets.
When the researchers asked the participants to determine which poets were fake and which were real, the participants guessed accurately about 46 percent of the time.
In a second experiment, the researchers had a different set of 696 participants assess poems based on 14 characteristics, including quality, rhythm, beauty, emotion, and originality.
They told one-third of the participants that they were reading poems produced by an AI chatbot and another third that they were reading poems written by humans. The final third of the participants were not given any information about the poems’ authorship.
In reality, all three groups were provided with a mix of poems written by humans and by AI. The participants who believed they were reading poetry written by AI gave lower ratings across 13 characteristics compared to those who thought they were reading human-written poetry, regardless of what they were actually reading.
Daniel CHETRONI – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
The most unexpected finding was that participants who did not know anything about the origins of the poems gave higher ratings to AI-generated poems than human-written ones.
The study authors suggested that people showed favoritism to AI poems because they are more straightforward, simpler to comprehend, and generally more accessible than the works of prominent poets.
AI-generated poems cannot reach the same level of complexity as human-authored verse. Therefore, they are better at clearly communicating a mood, emotion, or theme to readers who are not adept at deciphering poetry.
Furthermore, the structure and rhyme scheme of AI poems were more consistent and easier to interpret.
In some cases, participants might have misunderstood the complexity of human-written poetry as an indication that it was written by AI.
They may have been so confused by the genuine works that they chalked it up chatbot incoherence. Overall, the findings of the study seem to confirm the idea that AI will replace human artists someday.
The study was published in Scientific Reports.
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