Can you tell the difference between an AI-generated poem and a human-written one?
✍️ What’s your favorite poem of all time? Let us know in the responses. (I like this one.)
Today: The Tortured AI Poets Department, 34 survival tips, and an infrastructure engineer’s regrets. By Harris Sockel
Pop quiz: Which one of these poems is written by a human, and which is written by AI?
Daybreak
Golden rays peek over the horizon
Casting warmth on the sleeping land
The dark blanket of night recoils
As dawn’s light advances across the sky
Rosy hues dance and shimmer
Across low-hanging clouds
The sleeping world begins to stir
Creatures emerge and morning songs arise
A new day dawns, bright and full of promise
The rising sun banishes the dark
And illuminates a new beginning
Sunkissed
The rooster warbles.
I watch as the sun kisses
the horizon. Delicately —
like the earth would split
open with too much passion.
I watch as gold light embraces
my view. It glosses over the sky —
darkness fades into baby blue
with fingerprints of violet & cotton
candy pink. I breathe in the honey air.
I memorize this moment, when
the sun blesses the land & chases away
the ghosts of night.
I’m not going to give it away, but I found both of them in this fascinating Medium post by eighth-grade poet Sierra Elman. Elman challenged ChatGPT-4, Google Bard, and Anthropic’s Claude to a poetry contest: Could they write a poem about a sunrise that rivaled her own? A panel of 38 AI experts (engineers, execs, product managers) and 39 English experts (poets, professors, authors) rated each poem’s quality and guessed its authorship.
The results? Good poetry isn’t fake-able yet, and English experts were by far better at identifying which poems were AI-generated (11 English experts vs. 3 AI experts guessed the author of all four poems correctly). Judges who correctly identified the authors of each poem called out “clichés and logical flaws.” A middle-school English teacher of 20 years noted, “AI-generated poems overused literary devices, especially similes and metaphors!”
Maybe you’ve heard of the Harvard student who used Chat-GPT-written essays to pass all of her Freshman year classes. Poetry is different, though. “Unlike in essays, a major component of poetry is human emotion, which AI intrinsically lacks,” Elman writes. These results make it pretty clear that AI can’t fake human emotion… at least not yet.
Speaking of AI-generated writing, Medium’s director of curation wrote about how her team is contending with AI stories on the platform. Spoiler alert: Like with poetry, it’s all about focusing on quality.
What else we’re reading
- John DeVore offers 34 practical tips for surviving this wild, stressful, weird time in history. One example: buy someone a surprise gift this week. Random bouquets of flowers. Surprise Tuesday Donuts. The more unexpected the better.
- Software engineer Jack Lindamood looks back on every decision he endorses or regrets after four years running infrastructure at a startup. He endorses Slack as a collaboration tool with one important caveat (!) — always encourage people to post in public channels rather than sending private messages. Did you know that Slack stands for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”? Every message is part of the log.
- Related to that: Here’s Slack founder Stewart Butterfield’s legendary Medium post — originally an internal memo — about why the best brands in history sell something larger than their product itself: Harley-Davidson, for example, doesn’t just sell motorcycles or motorcycle-riding, it sells freedom and independence. A hypothetical saddle company, Butterfield writes, “could just sell saddles, and if so, they’d probably be selling on the basis of things like the quality of the leather they use or the fancy adornments their saddles include […] Or, they could sell horseback riding.”
From the archive
According to one study, it can take between 18 to 254 days to form a new habit. One tactic to track your progress? A minimalist journal. A single dot, square, or symbol each day is all you need. Michal Korzonek, the expert in minimalist journaling, wrote six years ago: “Tracking my daily progress over a long period of time made me aware of the activities that I want to add or remove from my life. I remained progress-oriented, while noticing that I’m in fact succeeding and becoming consistent.”
Your daily dose of wisdom (about health)
Kaki Okumura shares a Japanese proverb: “Eaten alone, even sea bream does not taste delicious.” Share a meal or snack with someone else to improve your health and longevity.
Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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