Ella Creamer in The Guardian: Poems written by AI are preferred to those written by humans, according to a new study. The non-expert poetry readers who participated were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as being written by humans than those actually written by humans.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, showed participants poems written by 10 famous English-language poets along with poems generated in the style of those poets by ChatGPT 3.5. Real and imitation poems by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Lasky were presented to participants.
Results showed that the odds of a poem written by a human being judged as human-authored were roughly 75% that of an AI-generated poem being judged as human-authored. Contrary to previous research, the study also found that participants ranked AI-generated poems higher in terms of overall quality than human-written poems.
Contrary to previous research, the study also found that participants ranked AI-generated poems higher in terms of overall quality than human-written poems.
The authors propose that non-expert readers prefer AI-generated poems because they find them more straightforward and accessible.
The “complexity and opacity” of human-written poetry is “part of the poems’ appeal”, write the study authors. Such poems “reward in-depth study and analysis, in a way that the AI-generated poetry may not”.
However, “because AI-generated poems do not have such complexity, they are better at unambiguously communicating an image, a mood, an emotion, or a theme to non-expert readers of poetry, who may not have the time or interest for the in-depth analysis demanded by the poetry of human poets,” they said.
More here.
