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AI. It’s been a part of our lives for decades, but with the emergence of Generative AI, technology has changed immensely. You know how in movies they show an art student and they start with a blank page, then add a few scribbles, and then seconds later they have this amazing, completed piece? It doesn’t even look believable, but it’s still fun to watch and see what they create. Well, today with a simple piece of software and a few swift keystrokes, we can tell an Artificial Intelligence to create almost anything. 

But what about poetry? Listen, art seems to be something that AI has struggled with thus far, but one of the first things it learns to do is write. But how well can AI provoke the emotional, intellectual, and sometimes physical response to a piece of poetry? As a poet myself, I base my poems off of experiences. However, AI doesn’t really have experiences. They answer questions, generate ideas, words, blueprints, codes, but we as people never had to generate friendship, love, passion, or anything else. So, how would AI create something that captivates people’s minds and hearts? 

The Test: 

I decided that I’m going to do a test: I’m giving AI a prompt to make 3 different poems on unrelated subjects, and I’m going to give myself the same prompts to see what one resonates more with you. Can you tell the difference between the person and the code? That seems to be a question we need to start asking ourselves more and more. 

So here are the three poem: 

 

1. write a poem about the way the elements work together

2. Write a poem about falling in love with your soul mate, after never thinking you’d find true love. 

3. Write a poem about an experience that has impacted your personal life in a positive way. 

 

Each prompt will make it slightly more difficult for the AI. At least, that’s the idea. We’ll see what it comes up with and if I’ll still have a tangible career after. 

I have some research, and it does seem that in general, people have a greater appreciation for Gen AI poetry than poems by people based on language and aesthetics. I still consider myself fairly new to the poetry world, and honestly, if I can’t write a poem better than AI, I honestly don’t know how I would feel. But, you know what, I love writing, and I won’t stop because a machine’s won once.  XD

I’m giving myself 13 minutes to write each poem because while AI can complete their poems nearly instantaneously, I am a human, and I write and think before I complete it. 

One of the important things to remember is that AI uses a lot of water to cool the servers down, so to reduce my impact on the environment, I’m only using one prompt. Creating too many uses too much water. I’ll display the prompt below.

“Could you write three different free verse poems? One about how the elements work together, one on falling in love with your soulmate after never believing you could find true love, and one about an experience that affected your life in a positive way. Can you make them evoke emotion and connect with people who read it?”

That prompt should be thorough enough that I don’t need to do another one. Now, I’m going to use that prompt for myself and write my poems. I’m not going to tell you which poem is AI and which one is by me, a professional poet. You’ll have to guess and see if you get it right. 

The Poems:

On the elements:

An Elemental Embrace

Do you think we’re separate? 

Moving alone but magically working together

To make Air move I use my foliage 

To tickle him till he exhales. 

And when I’m cold, 

Heat showers me and wraps me in his embrace.

And when I’m parched, 

Water flows into every part of me She can. 

We’ve supported each other

From the second we came to be,

Creating everlasting balance

That touches every life. 

 

The Symphony of the Elements

They do not ask permission. 

The wind dances through trees as if 

the sky whispered a song and 

The branches already knew the choreography.

 Fire flickers—not to destroy, 

but to warm what the earth shelters beneath its skin. 

Rain hums over rock, smoothing jagged edges 

like time brushing memory.

Each plays its part, not in isolation, 

but in the silence between waves, 

in the hush before lightning splits the sky. 

Even chaos has rhythm.

Nature isn’t competing— 

it’s conspiring. To bloom. To break. To become.

On falling in love:

The Ultimate Frontier:

It’s not like I've never seen it. 

It just felt like a system

That was never made for me. 

A fleeting scene that I 

Could only pause, but

I couldn’t feel it.

Maybe my heart was busy 

Trying to compute something

From a language it couldn’t understand. 

But then, through it all,

I saw you. 

And then the moment 

No longer felt that it was 

Whipping past me,

And when our eyes met, 

I knew that I no longer had 

To search for it;

It found me. 

I fell in love with 

My soulmate and it is you.

 

After the Walls Fell:

I never believed in forever— 

just in passing faces, 

and the ache of “almost.”

Love felt like a rumor passed 

from lips I couldn’t trust. 

I stood with arms folded, 

watching others dive in while 

I measured the depth from shore.

Then you, without thunder or trumpet, 

arrived like morning— ordinary, inevitable. 

Your touch didn’t shatter my doubts— 

it dissolved them.

And suddenly, forever didn’t feel like a promise. 

It felt like walking home on a path I forgot I built.

 

An experience: 

 

The Day I Learned to Speak My Name:

It wasn’t a grand moment— 

no standing ovation, no beam of light.

Just me, on the edge of giving up, 

when someone said not “what’s wrong with you?” 

but “what’s happened to you?”

That was the fracture. That was the balm.

I learned to speak pain without apology. 

I learned joy was a muscle 

you had to use often or 

forget how it worked.

It’s strange—how one question can

 tilt your axis and how 

kindness can be the loudest thing in a quiet room.

Meeting Beauty:

It felt like such a minor thing. 

My life felt shattered for a moment

And when I thought I wasn’t going to 

Make it through that week,

The next one began and I 

Realised that my world was 

Still spinning as usual. 

And no one treated me differently, 

No was offended by my presence,

And the worst of what I thought

Never came to fruition.

And that’s when I realised that

Makeup isn’t what makes you 

Beautiful, confident, acceptable, or professional.

As long as your heart is as full 

Of beauty as your character, 

Your inner beauty is all the 

Makeup you’ll ever need. 

Let it shine through. 

 

Those are the poems! I formatted the AI poetry and my own to look as similar as possible because there are certain key elements that make AI writing obvious such as emoticons that are generated by AI, and formatting in almost prose-like material. I even made sure the titles looked similar. Can you tell which is which? Keep in mind, my poems are my own style, and each poet, while influenced by other writers, has their own signature style. 

Background Research

If you’re someone unfamiliar with poetry, first of all thanks for reading this far. Honestly, until a few days ago, I had no idea that people couldn’t tell the difference between AI and human generated poetry. In fact, some people prefer it… until they discover it’s written by zeroes and ones. So let’s uncover how on earth Gen AI is taking over the poetry world. 

 

Generative AI is essentially a self learning system that collects data, stores it, and studies everything it can on a topic to present you what you want, from answers to your 3am questions, to an art piece, to a video of a shoe morphing into a dancing woman. So how did those digital fingers dip into my art form? Well, AI searches online databases that it can access, learning from classic works like Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens, and even modern poets like Rupi Kaur. It then takes what it learns, and imitates both human emotion and experience that appears human-like because it was originally human created. This blend of reality and technology creates an illusion where you’re consistently having to ask yourself, “is this real?” “Am I looking at something a piece of software has created?” 

 

The scariest, and honestly frustrating thing about Gen AI is that it’s only going to improve. You notice how unnatural and creepy those videos look with people in them, or how many fingers a picture of a person can have? Those mistakes are going to disappear as it learns its way to perfecting human creativity. But remember, it’s only imitating human creativity. It’s code; AI isn’t creative, at least not yet. And if you’re scared, that’s fine. Just know there are ways to use AI for good. Intellectual Takeout wrote “Plagiarism is a good description for what ChatGPT actually does. We need to set aside, from the outset, all the nonsense about “intelligence” or “understanding” or “consciousness” existing in AI chatbots like ChatGPT.” This is something that I’m leaning towards agreeing upon. With how hard people have worked, pouring parts of themselves into the pages of a book, a single line, a singular page, it doesn’t feel right that Gen AI is getting credit for its work. And yet, because it hasn’t plagiarised word for word what someone else has created, it's considered its own. 

Final Thoughts

 

I don’t believe AI is evil. In fact it’s not even AI’s fault. I don’t think basic artificial intelligence thought Gen AI was going to be a thing. The truth is, it’s a tool, and like any tool, if used the wrong way, people’s lives can be negatively affected. So, if you want to support other creatives like me, use AI smartly, and find ways you can give them further visibility. It takes effort from everyone who chooses. We never know where technology is going to go, but we can learn to protect ourselves. I hope that you enjoyed this post and got inspired. Remember life has so much in store for us all.