PEOPLE prefer poems written by artificial intelligence to works by famous writers like Shakespeare and Lord Byron, a study has found.

Readers rated virtual verse as more emotional, creative and beautiful — until they found it was churned out by a bot.

Scientists think rhymes written by algorithms use simpler language, so people enjoy them more than complicated old classics.

They tested the effects on 2,300 people who were not poetry experts — and found readers could not tell the difference.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, Pittsburgh University’s Brian Porter said: “Like AI-generated paintings and faces, AI poems are now ‘more human than human’.

“We find people rate AI-generated poems more highly. However, they evaluate them more negatively when told the poem is AI generated.”

His study used poems by William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, ­Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Lasky.

AI software ChatGPT was told to write test poems in the same style.

Artists fear artificial intelligence is becoming so powerful it can replace people in creative jobs.

It can generate photos in seconds and videos in minutes which look so real they can fool people as “deepfakes”. Students are also routinely caught using AI to write essays.

Mr Porter added: “Poetry was previously one of the last remaining domains of text in which generative AI language models had not yet become indistinguishable from human work.

“However, our findings indicate that their capabilities have outpaced people’s expectations.”

Can you tell the A.I. poem from the real thing?

Answers below

2