Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: April 13, 2025

Issue 154

Hello, Muse Readers!

We came across an interesting article in The Times of London about a study which examines how well people can tell the difference between classic poetry and AI-generated imitations of classic works. The research was conducted by Brian Porter and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and published in Scientific Reports.

The study involved 100 poems—50 written by some of the most celebrated poets in English literature and 50 generated by AI models trained to mimic the style of these literary figures, such as Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron, Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare, and Sylvia Plath. Over 1,000 participants were asked to evaluate these poems and determine whether they were written by a human or a machine.

The results were startling! Participants not only struggled to identify AI-generated poetry, but they liked the AI poems better than the poetry written by some of the most revered figures in literature. The five poems which nearly all of the participants judged to…