AI Poetry Is Better than Human Poetry If You Don’t Like Poetry

The no beauty of no poems for no one.

Roses are red/Die human scum.

Human beings prefer poems written by AI to poems written by other human beings.

That was the conclusion of a study published this week which asked non-experts to rate poems by 10 poets (Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Lasky) against AI generated imitations of those poets. The non-experts consistently rated the AI imitations as superior to the human-authored originals. (The readers also were more likely to say that the AI imitations were written by humans, presumably because they figured that they would like poems by humans better.)

The researchers speculated that non-experts prefer the AI poems better because the AI poems are simpler and more straightforward. People who like poetry like the poetry because of its “complexity and opacity.” The ambiguity and the way poem’s push meaning across various bounds of non-meaning is what people who read poetry like about the poetry they read. But for non experts, the difficulty, or just the poetryness, is a turn off.

Or as the study authors put it, “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.”

Unsurprisingly, some human poets were irritated by these results. Joelle Taylor, a prize-winning poet, protested, “humanity is at the core of what a poem is.” She added, “A poem is more than an algorithm. It is meaning, empathy, revelation, inversion, dissidence, passion, and surprise: poetry is what happens in the space between logic and chaos.”

Taylor’s argument ignores at least a century of avant-garde poets who have tried to take humanity out of poetry, as I discuss in this piece. But perhaps more to the point here is the fact that Taylor’s idea of what poetry is has little connection with the public’s idea of what poetry is.

AI is often presented as an attack on the arts, or as a danger to artists. But often the philistine anti-art aspects of AI are simply extensions of, or reflections of, the anti-art presuppositions of the public, and the anti-art functions of the market. AI has no consciousness, no ethics, no taste. The fact that people like bad AI poetry is not the fault of AI. It simply reflects a human truth.

And what is that human truth? It’s pretty straightforward.

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