What are the odds AI can be a (good) poet? Let’s find out!
Poetry is straight-up emotional creativity. It’s something even we humans struggle with, and if someone had told me to try this with an AI tool in the pre-GPT world, I would’ve laughed the idea off.
However, ChatGPT is different. It’s more creative and can instantly put elementary human skills to shame.
It can code, draft emails, do the math, translate, summarize, and has much more up its sleeve.
So, how deep can a poet be in ChatGPT?
ChatGPT and Poetry
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is by far the most creative public-available artificial intelligence. Even though expecting to create like a top-notch poet could be a forever unimaginable dream, it can easily top “standard” people like me.
Ergo, we will start with a few prompts, easy to complex, and try to find where (or if) it breaks apart. In addition, we’ll see a few more alternatives.
Let’s begin.
Laugh poetically on the irony that a human is asking artificial intelligence to do poetry. (4 paragraphs maximum)
Except for the A creature of life….poetic toil, it felt pretty basic, and taking the prompts as is. Besides, it seems to be taking “irony” as the one creating poems which doesn’t make much sense.
Moving on. Let’s try a few more inputs.
Now that felt a lot more…poetic. Not like poetic deep, but still, it’s bearable.
And frankly, good poetry is generally the aftermath of (good or bad) emotional turbulence that a machine can not experience unless it goes sentient, which is a different territory altogether.
So until then, we shouldn’t expect a Robert Frost from ChatGPT.
Anyway.
But what I couldn’t ignore is that ChatGPT poetic creations always rhyme. Not that rhyming is bad or anything. In fact, it sounds best to any non-native English speaker like me.
Still, free verse is equally important, and so are other forms of poetry.
Therefore, I asked ChatGPT what poetry schemes it’s familiar with, and it came up pretty confident about most.
Heck, I haven’t even heard of all these! Time to see if this AI can walk the talk.
Generate a limerick about a little girl wishing for a chocolate tree in her bedroom.
What do you think?
Well, it’s a limerick, for one. And it followed the structure perfectly, including the number of lines and AABBA rhyming scheme, which is great as well.
And the delivery seems flawless.
Moving on to a serious tone, I called on ChatGPT to try free verse.
Write a free verse as a Hiroshima bombing survivor, appealing to all nuclear-armed nations to denuclearise themselves (4 paragraphs maximum).
Touching. However, it just can’t break free from rhyming. AABB rhyming structure is visible in all paragraphs except the third one.
ChatGPT and Rhyming
Ohh! So there are others too. And it seems ChatGPT is trained to rhyme whenever it comes to poetry.
But since it’s based on machine learning, meaning it will need its developers to make adjustments to help it do anything new, and it’ll be like this until an update enhances its poetic abilities.
Alternatively, they can base ChatGPT future versions on deep learning (obviously, easier said than done) to automate learning like humans.
Just to confirm, I have tried a few more prompts, and every response seems to suffer from some kind of rhythmic overdose.
Finally, something worked (and maybe that’s why prompt engineering is a career).
So, it’s a free verse, after all. Still, it isn’t presented like one. Ultimately, it took one more prompt to get what we know as true free-verse poetry.
It felt nothing less than an accomplishment to get ChatGPT out of its rhythmic addiction.
In particular, you can include something like free verse format without internal or external rhymes in the prompt.
Overall, this is a great achievement for an AI. And I gladly admit this level of poetry feels good to me, and I would genuinely enjoy more of such creations.
So far, we have seen ChatGPT do free verse and limericks. Rhyme and not rhyme. And it passed those barriers with notable creativity.
Now, let’s wrap up this ChatGPT poetry evaluation with one final little test.
A sonnet.
Write down a sonnet about a mother looking at the clouds and trying to picture her upcoming twins as a boy (Ryan) and a girl (Emma).
There is no point in questioning ChatGPT’s poetic prowess anymore. For me, it’s good enough to rejoice, and it sets a level I wish all poets overcome with ease.
Alternate AI Poetry Tools
While ChatGPT is good (and sometimes great), the responses you saw above were from GPT 4, it’s latest and greatest (paid) version.
So if you do the same prompts with GPT-3.5, which is the free version, the quality can take a hit.
Therefore, there are some options you can try. And though a few of them are based on the ChatGPT itself, you can use them without an OpenAI account.
#1. AI Poem Generator
This says that it uses “AI technology from OpenAI” in its About section, which most probably indicates its ChatGPT underpinning.
The best thing about it is that you can start right away. No registration is required.
This is a completely free tool that explicitly mentions generating rhyming poems. And even with the prompts, which gave us non-rhyming free verse with ChatGPT (4), this gave rhyming responses.
Consequently, I suspect this is based on the free version of ChatGPT, which isn’t that creative. And it does not keep history, which you can get with a free ChatGPT account.
Finally, the only reason to use this poem generator is to quickly get a poem or two without the need to sign up.
#2. Canva
Canva is best known for elementary graphic design. However, it has recently launched Magic Write, an AI writer you can also use to create poems.
This is a paid tool with 25 free credits to taste its poetic talents.
On the quality front, it felt okay to rhyme poems. And I couldn’t prompt it to generate a non-rhyming free verse.
However, being a paid product from Canva, you can expect it to improve in the coming updates.
#3. ToolBaz
This one from ToolBaz is much better with a creativity toggle and voice input. And it’s totally free of cost and works without asking for registration.
Besides, you can view the recent creations. However, there is no information about the time it keeps the data for. So it’s wise to back up important ones. And like the others on this list, creating non-rhyming poetry is tough for ToolBaz too.
Finally, it gives a one-click option to copy the creation and read it aloud.
#4. Google Bard
Bard is a 100% free option, and it comes from a well-known tech powerhouse, Google.
You can expect a few good things from Bard. First, it retains past responses. Second, it takes voice input. And finally, it gives three versions of any response with a single prompt which is a huge plus for poetry creation.
Besides, you can export the responses as email drafts in Gmail and Google Docs.
And it can write non-rhyming poetry too. The only problem is I told it to generate two paragraphs, and it responded with seven! So, it’s not good at keeping count.
While there are more free tools to write poems, most seem to suffer from similar limitations. And ChatGPT (even the free version) is the best I could find.
Poetry & Machine!
Even with all those imperfections, AI has come a long way. And if the first generation of generative AI is this good, the future surely packs some serious punch.
If you’re still reading, you might have found Google Bard a worthy ChatGPT competition.
To help you make the right call, we have two more guides: first, where you can see Google Bard vs. ChatGPT over a few prompts, and the latter convincingly steals the show. And second, things where Bard is better than ChatGPT.
Stay tuned!
