Poetry is having a moment. Yes, yes, we’ve heard this before—usually during National Poetry Month in April. Or the inauguration of a president or the selection of a new poet laureate. But in this case the moment is coming from an unlikely source: the meteoric emergence of artificial intelligence large language models and the remarkable text they can generate.
For doomsayers, the future is clear: AI will destroy humanity.
Champions of these new technologies, however, claim that they will free us from the often tedious work of rote reporting and summarizing information and will enhance human capacity to synthesize knowledge and thus find better solutions to everyday and extraordinary problems more quickly and authoritatively. Huzzah! But among the most curious and perhaps frequently noted claims from these same cheerleaders is that AI can also . . . write poetry!!!