AI: who erases the poets?
I read, with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief, a study that claimed that many people prefer artificial intelligence-generated poetry because they find it more pleasant, clear, and emotive than human poetry. Researchers Brian Porter and Édouard Machery argued in Scientific Reports that, for many readers, these texts even surpassed those of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, or Emily Dickinson.
Faced with the proliferation of alarmist and superficial headlines about AI, I decided to go a little further. When you delve deeper, the picture changes: it's not that “ChatGPT's poetry is liked more by everyone”, but rather that, in samples of non-expert readers, it can seem more accessible or clear, especially when it is mistakenly attributed to a human author. What emerges is a perceptual bias: what is not “human” is recognized as such. But this does not imply, by a long shot, literary superiority of AI.
What is hinted at is an old shadow: the tendency to displace the artist, to erase their presence. Generating art with AI plunges us into a territory of invisibility that many creators know all too well. Because, let's not kid ourselves, power —who governs narratives and emotions, who controls technology— has always wanted to control too, and especially, artistic resources to influence society more and better.
Humanity's last job: connecting in a disconnected worldTherefore, when sociologist Allison J. Pugh warns in her book The Last Human Work: Connecting in a Disconnected World that AI can eliminate human authorship and reduce people to data and functions, the question is inevitable: what do we do? Do we know our poets? Do we read them, value them, recognize them? Or do we keep them invisible under a regime of precariousness?Perhaps the challenge is not technical, but ethical. Let's return the name to the artists. Let's not yield to the seduction of an art that often just replicates. Let's give them voice, presence, and dignity. Only then will we make the voice of the poets a reality: “You know, I have read / that souls do not die” (Anna Akhmatova in Requiem and Other Poems).