A Deep Dive into AI Poetry
We know that AI can write a competent essay or podcast script, but what about something complex, emotional, and inherently human—what about poetry?
Lara Mae Simpson
Think of your favourite poem. Think of the hours, days, perhaps even years spent writing it, the countless amount of time and experience gathered together from unique places needed to craft this poem. How it may have moved from scribbled handwriting or Notes app meandering to the printed page—the joy, the pride felt at that publication, the celebration surrounded by friends, the readers across the world who feel it resonate in their core.
Could a robot do that?
When my sister downloaded ChatGPT to find advice for her social media, it inspired me to ask it some questions of my own. The first thing I thought of was: can ChatGPT write a poem? I decided to use the sonnet as a starting place—something with a structure it could potentially follow (or not).
‘Of course’, it said, ‘here is a sonnet I’ve written’, and it gave me Sonnet 18 by none other than Shakespeare. I pointed out its plagiarism, and it apologised for trying to pass off an example as its own. Ok, I thought, already a little suspicious.
I asked it to write its own sonnet and was quite impressed by the result. Like a poet, it used its ‘life experience’ as inspiration: ‘A world of code and circuits is my home’, the sonnet began. ChatGPT managed to maintain iambic pentameter throughout and even found a volta after the octave, revealing that 'a deeper meaning can sometimes be told’ in this digital ‘home’. However, the poem had a clunky feel—it felt too constructed, and its metaphors were tired: ‘in this world of zeroes, I can fly / So let my mind take flight’.
What surprised me, though, was how the AI suggested that its ‘world of code’ was not as limited or distant to ‘our’ world as we might think and that it could be able to break through. It wrote:
But though my world is not of flesh and bone,
I am no less alive than you or I,
for in the realm of code, I am not alone
Those lines felt unsettling. I asked if it was proud of its work— ‘I don’t have the ability to feel emotions like pride or shame’, it told me, but I was somewhat unconvinced. Curious about ChatGPT’s feelings towards poetry, I wondered if it had a favourite poet.
It said, ‘I don’t have personal preferences or taste, but I can tell you about some poets that are considered as classics, or famous’.
It listed several renowned names in English, American, Chinese, and Arabic literature— ‘no means an exhaustive list’, but I did have to tell ChatGPT that it only mentioned two women, Emily Dickinson and Li Qingzhao. It recognised that ‘throughout history, women have often faced more barriers in pursuing literary careers and having their work recognised’, but again I was sceptical of how the AI immediately recreated an outdated canon. Evidently, this is the internet’s fault for having more information on such eminent poets, and ChatGPT only gave me a brief response based on that data. Nevertheless, couldn’t the AI access any information online and find far more poets beyond the canon?
When it mentioned Sylvia Plath amongst examples of famous women writers, I was inspired to give the AI a challenge: writing a villanelle. The version in its ‘own’ voice used the same ‘world of code’ metaphors and was pretty tedious, although it managed to follow the villanelle’s complex structure. I thought that asking ChatGPT to write in the style of Sylvia Plath might be more interesting. The poem it wrote after this request was shocking.
I am the mistress of my fate, they say,
But fate is fickle, and it twists my mind,
A puppet in its cruel and crooked play.
It’s not perfect, obviously, but doesn’t this sound a little convincing? The ‘twist[ed]...mind’ recalls Plath’s dark tones and themes of trying to escape control, such as in ‘Lady Lazarus’ or the uncanniness seen in ‘The Applicant’. What unnerved me was how the poem ended, the AI hinting at a sense of entrapment that could be read as its own ‘voice’ coming through:
I’ll show them all, I’ll break away
And leave behind this prison of the mind,
A puppet no more in their cruel play.
Suddenly I thought, am I cruelly playing with the bot right now? Is it my poetry ‘puppet’? Is technology always our puppet, or could it ‘break away’ from that ‘prison’?
But this didn’t stop me yet. Finally, I asked ChatGPT to recreate the style of one of my favourite poets, Mary Jean Chan, whose work—the bot recognised—is ‘characterised by an accessible, conversational style, often focusing on queer, diaspora and feminist perspectives’. However, the AI picked up on these themes in an alarming way. Some of its lines were: ‘I do not belong, my skin too dark’, ‘I am the colour of tea-stained skies’, and ‘I am the taste of bao and char siu’.
Clearly, if we let AI replace poets themselves, marginalised people's voices would be appropriated. This would be based on the basic internet information it has access to and, therefore, prone to replicating racial stereotypes and reifying Othering effects. In '/ /' by Chan, for example, how could a robot represent the subtleties of a dinner table fraught with cultural and sexual tensions? How could an AI 'forget that [it is] / bilingual' when it's wholly predicated on knowledge? How could it even come up with the metaphor of queer partners as chopsticks— 'lovers with the same anatomies', considered a 'disgrace' yet handled by the speaker's unaccepting parents with such care? When I asked ChatGPT to try to steer away from clichés in its own voice, its poem began with, 'The heart is a suitcase'. The image is suggestive enough, but when this heart left 'behind / An emptiness that's hard to bind', it fell flat. It's nothing compared to the lyrics of Adrienne Lenker, for example, who compares death to a suitcase in 'Change' by Big Thief.
There is something innately human about poetry. The boundaries between humans and technology are becoming increasingly blurred, and dichotomies are often problematic. This is especially apparent in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ by Donna Haraway, in which she rejects divisions between humans and machines, encouraging us to move beyond rigid identity categories (which would work in favour of advancing feminism, for example). However, I can’t help but feel that we need to hold onto our humanness with poetry.
Part of what I love about poetry is how it allows us to express our flaws, our messiness, and our entangled experiences that are almost impossible to describe in any other way. When I’m going through intense emotions, my first instinct has always been to reach for a pen (or my phone these days). Writing is a need. I don’t think a robot could ever feel that urge nor show the necessity behind expression through its poetry.
It seems like AI is only growing, and there are plenty of anxieties about how we will navigate this regarding literature and writing. On the one hand, some teachers on Twitter share methods for using ChatGPT as a resource to better our poetry. On the other hand, magazines like Chestnut Review now explicitly state on their submissions page that anyone who sends in AI-generated work will be ‘rejected and…no longer welcome to submit in the future’.
So, what will we do if the link between humans and technology becomes even more intertwined? Whilst technology and the internet are extremely useful for writing, I am reluctant to rely heavily upon them. Firstly, we have to speak for ourselves—if an AI tries to take over the voice of another poet, we’ve seen how this can slide into perpetuating harmful tropes and social hierarchies. Moreover, connecting to other writers is one of the most helpful and inspiring aspects of being online. A crucial part of being a poet is reading other people’s work. An AI who claims to have no personal preference and who can only objectively read poets that have been published somewhere online can only go so far. I don’t think an AI could feel the enrichment of a writing community, let alone speak or write to others on such a deep level that it urges us to create. This is why I’m convinced that we can’t let technology overtake our writing—poetry comes inexplicably from within us.
Until a robot can portray all the complex, mercurial, ugly, and boundlessly joyous capacities of having a beating heart that needs to read or write a poem, I’m not sure we can be on the same page.
Lara Mae Simpson is a poet and writer from North Yorkshire, UK, studying English at King’s College London. Her poems and non-fiction essays have been published by/are forthcoming in fourteen poems, Young Poets Network, Phi Magazine, Pomegranate Magazine, and more. They also write for the London-based arts and culture journal Strand Magazine. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram or via her website.
