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ChatGPT Poetry Is Surprisingly Pretty, But It Lacks Two Things

Answering the question of whether AI can make art

Linda Caroll
The Generator
7 min readDec 14, 2024

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Bard playing string instrument with glowing butterflies hand drawn illustration
Bard playing string instrument with glowing butterflies, illustration licensed from Deposit Photos

It started so simply. Someone sent me a poem, asked what I think. So I clicked to read it. The words were pretty enough. The poem used simile instead of metaphor but that’s whatever — could be a style choice.

But something felt weird. The poem felt off somehow. Wasn’t quite sure what it was that struck me as not right. Not right away, anyway.

On a whim, I pasted the poem into an AI detector. Boom, it scored 100%. So I pasted it into another AI detector, and another. Four in total. They all said the same thing. 100% AI. Zero chance this was written by a human.

Until that moment, I don’t think I’d ever read poetry written by AI.

Honestly? I was a little horrified. Staring at that poem, knowing AI wrote it, here’s what occurred to me. Some people will look at the pretty words and, like Kerouac standing by his truck in the dark of night watching the fireworks, they’re going to say ooh, ah, wow. Think it’s good.

It’s a lesson we humans still haven’t learned.

That pretty isn’t always good.

We haven’t learned it with people, much less with words. Look at some pretty thing, forget what…

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The Generator
The Generator

Published in The Generator

The Generator covers the emerging field of generative AI, with generative AI news, critical analysis, real-world tests and experiments, expert interviews, tool reviews, culture, and more

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