✍️ People Prefer AI-Generated Poetry to the Classics. But They Wouldn't Admit It
Poetry generated by artificial intelligence is already practically indistinguishable from human-authored content, and people may like it more. These are the findings made by the University of Pittsburgh researchers after the two experiments.
In the first experiment, readers were to guess the authorship of works, half created by ChatGPT-3.5 and the other half by Shakespeare, Byron, and other famous English-language poets.
Most of the study participants assumed that the poems from AI were written by humans. Moreover, they were wrong more often than when guessing blindly. The subjects had specific ideas about the differences between man-made and machine-created texts. Still, they turned out to be wrong, the scientists concluded.
In the second experiment, volunteers rated poems on 14 characteristics, including quality, beauty, emotion, rhythm, and originality. Some readers were told that all the poems were written by AI, some believed all the works had human authors, and the rest were not told anything.
On average, people liked the ChatGPT-generated poems better in terms of the rhythm and beauty of the syllables. However, participants evaluated poems more negatively when told that they were generated by AI than when told they were human-written.
🤔 T.S. Eliot's poem "The Boston Evening Transcript" was most often judged to be the product of AI. "It didn't make sense to me or come from someone that has feelings," one reader wrote.
The study authors attribute the results to the fact that most participants were not poetry experts and read poems a couple times a year at most. AI-generated poems appeared more straightforward and accessible and, oddly enough, "more human than human."
"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," the study authors commented.
Can you tell a poem written by algorithms from the one by the classics?
❤️ — of course, you can always tell!
🤔 — not sure anymore...