Someone set ChatGPT up to trying:

From AI analyst Gary Marcus:

A new AI study is making the rounds, claiming that ChatGPT can write poetry that is “indistinguishable” from William Shakespeare.

Um, by whom?

My frequent collaborator Ernest Davis had a careful look at the study, methods, materials, etc, and not just the headline.

His dissection of the poetry study makes for an entertaining read. I don’t want to spoil all the fun, but I’ll say this:

Come for quotes like this “the AI poems seem like imitations that might have been produced by a supremely untalented poet who had never read any of the poems he was tasked with imitating, but had read a one-sentence summary of what they were like”.

Stay for the Appendix, entitled “Particularly terrible lines”.

“On hype, and the unbearable banality of ChatGPT’s poetry,” November 19, 2024

Having been a writing instructor, I know at least one thing about the business of teaching writing: If a student absolutely cannot see the difference between classic poetry and utter banality, that student will not succeed in a career in literature imply by trying harder or wanting to do better. There are things one can teach and there are things one can’t. Of course such a student can learn to produce passable bureaucratic prose but that is hardly “indistinguishable” from William Shakespeare.

A lot will come down to the question of which side of that divide chatbots end up on and some of us suspect we know.