AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry

> We propose that people rate AI poems more highly across all metrics in part because they find AI poems more straightforward. AI-generated poems in our study are generally more accessible than the human-authored poems in our study. In our discrimination study, participants use variations of the phrase “doesn’t make sense” for human-authored poems more often than they do for AI-generated poems

I think this says more about the state of (English based) poetry over the past 150 years than it does about the ability of AI to generate competent poems. With the advent of Modernism, the poetry-industrial complex's ideas about what constituted a Good (English) Poem diverged significantly from what the general (English speaking) population expected a poem to be, how it was constructed, presented, etc. Teaching these new forms of poetry schools left generations of people confused and disinterested. Yet people need poetry in their lives; they found that poetry in popular music and Hallmark card verses.

Of course, popular poetry isn't dead. Poetry book sales in recent years (in the UK) has "boomed"[1][2]. I'll not argue the merits of the poetry being generated by the latest crop of Poet Superstars; at the end of the day their work sells because people find comfort and joy in it - and that is a positive outcome in my view!

> Given people’s difficulties identifying machine-written texts, and their apparent trust that AI will not generate imitations of human experience, it may be worthwhile for governments to pursue regulations regarding transparency in the use of AI systems.

I think AI does threaten the careers of current Poetry Superstars. Building a website to pair an AI generated outline image with some cozy AI generated verses about a given situation/emotion/discovery should be an easy project to build. Allowing users to personalise the output so they can use the results as a gift for loved ones etc might be a viable product?

But I don't see much value in forcing anyone using AI to produce creative assets to label the output as such. For one thing, there's no guarantee that anyone using those assets will maintain the labelling. A much better approach would be for poets who don't use AI to help them craft poems to label their work as "100% Human" - in the years to come it might even become a positive selling point!

[1] - https://www.thebookseller.com/spotlight/poetry-on-course-for...

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/24/poetry-sales-b...