ChatGPT or Shakespeare? Readers Couldn’t Tell the Difference—and Even Preferred A.I.-Generated Verse

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Posted on 11/20/2024 3:32:08 PM PST by Angelino97

If all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players, where does that leave non-human figures, like artificial intelligence chatbots? As it turns out, A.I. can hold its own against humans—even the Bard himself—when it comes to writing poetry.

A.I. chatbots can imitate famous poets like William Shakespeare well enough to fool many human readers, according to a new paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. In addition, many study participants actually preferred the chatbot’s poetry over the works of renowned writers.

Researchers asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 to generate poems in the style of well-known authors, including Walt Whitman, Geoffrey Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare.

Then, they gathered 1,634 study participants and asked them each to read ten poems—five written by a human poet, and five written by the chatbot in the style of that same human poet. The poet was randomly assigned to each participant.

When scientists asked participants to identify which poems were fake and which were real, the participants guessed correctly around 46 percent of the time—just a little bit worse than if they’d flipped a coin instead. This finding wasn’t necessarily a surprise, since ChatGPT-3.5 was likely trained on the works of the famous poets.

“Essentially, ChatGPT has displayed its skill as a quasi-plagiarist,” says Keith Holyoak, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study, to New Scientist’s Jeremy Hsu.

(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...

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1 posted on 11/20/2024 3:32:08 PM PST by Angelino97

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