Until not too long ago, it was believed that AI would become very good at technical tasks, but it could be a while before it ends up becoming doing things that require creativity. But even the creativity bastion appears to be falling rapidly to AI.
AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable to humans from human-written poetry and is even rated more favorably, a study published in Nature has found. The study used non-expert poetry readers, and asked them to guess if a poem was written by AI or by humans. The study discovered that people had less then 50 percent accuracy in identifying AI-generated poems, and thought that the majority of AI-generated poems were written by humans. Moreover, people thought that poems written by AI were better in terms of rhythm and quality, and rated them as better than human-written poems.
The researchers who conducted the study collected 5 poems each from 10 well-known English poets including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Lord Byron and others. They then asked ChatGPT 3.5 to create 5 poems in the style of each of those 10 poets. They then randomly took 5 human-generated and 5 AI-generated poems, and gave them to 696 participants.
“We..found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems (46.6% accuracy, χ2(1, N=16,340)=75.13, p<0.0001),” the study said. “Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems (χ2(2, N=16,340)=247.04, p<0.0001). We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored,” it added.
These are pretty interesting results, and suggest that AI model can compete — and even outshine — humans in creative tasks. This could, of course, have far-reaching implications for creative fields. AI-generated photos and paintings are already all over social media, and are often indistinguishable from human creations. AI can also generate video at a fraction of the costs of a human setup, and it now appears that AI is able to write poems in the style of all-time greats like Shakespeare and Chaucer so well that ordinary people are unable to differentiate them from the real thing. It remains to be seen how AI performance scales in these creative fields, but if early results are any indication, AI could be just as good at creative tasks as it already seems to be at technical ones.