A new study shows that readers inexperienced with poetry prefer AI-generated texts, finding them clearer and easier to understand than those written by real poets.
People prefer poems written by AI to those written by real poets Photo Shutterstock
A team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh tested how inexperienced readers relate to poems by real people and creations generated by artificial intelligence. The researchers presented participants with poems written by 10 famous English language poets, alongside poems generated in the same poets’ style by ChatGPT 3.5.
According to The Guardian, during the test, participants were given poems from several real and fictional writers. Their list includes: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Lasky.
The results of the study show that the chances of a poem written by a human being perceived as written by a human were about 75% lower than the chances of an AI-generated poem being perceived as written by a real person. Contrary to other previous research, participants characterized AI-generated poems as better than those written by real poets.
According to the study’s authors, novice readers chose the AI-generated poems because they find them more direct and easier to understand. Researchers have noted that it is precisely the complexity and enigmatic character of human-written poetry that amplifies the depth of the message.
Instead, “because AI-generated poems lack this complexity, they are better at clearly communicating an image, mood, emotion, or theme to non-expert readers who may not have the time or interest to analyze in depth required by the poems of human poets,” the researchers explained.
“While I have no doubt that AI can almost perfectly generate a poetic Fibonacci sequence by reverse engineering known works, humanity is the essence of what a poem is. A poem is more than an algorithm. It is meaning, empathy, revelation, inversion, dissent, passion and surprise: poetry is what happens in the space between logic and chaos”said Poet Joelle Taylor, TS Eliot Prize-winning author of C+nto & Othered Poems.
The authors of the study said that it would be advisable for governments to regulate AI in terms of transparency precisely because there is great difficulty for readers to identify text written by machines and “an apparent confidence that AI will not generate imitations of human experience”.
