Could I but ride indefinite As doth the meadow-bee And visit only where I liked, And no man visit me, I’d soar above the verdant hills, In search of hidden glades, Where sunlight filters through the trees, And dances in the shades. The breeze would be my constant friend, The sky my boundless roof, And in the hush of nature’s breath, I’d find my living proof. For in the silence of the wild, My soul would find its peace, A gentle, endless wandering, Where all my cares would cease, In nature’s vast embrace, My heart’s true, quiet lease.

Could I but ride indefinite As doth the meadow-bee And visit only where I liked, And no man visit me,

I’d soar above the verdant hills, In search of hidden glades, Where sunlight filters through the trees, And dances in the shades.

The breeze would be my constant friend, The sky my boundless roof, And in the hush of nature’s breath, I’d find my living proof.

For in the silence of the wild, My soul would find its peace, A gentle, endless wandering, Where all my cares would cease, In nature’s vast embrace, My heart’s true, quiet lease.

Do you like Emily Dickinson? Her poetry is beautiful, isn’t it? Original, evocative, vivid. The rhymes are subtle. The lines flow softly from one image to the next.

If you thought these stanzas were written by Dickinson, you are not alone. All but one of the eight students who participated in our pilot study on responses to AI-generated poetry thought so too.

Yet only the first four lines are Dickinson’s. The remaining lines were generated by OpenAI’s GPT4o. You can read what Dickinson actually wrote here.

Our study set out to explore students’ responses to AI-generated poems. We especially wanted to know if AI poetry could produce the same feelings of emotional connection and growth that have long been associated with reading literature.

Researchers have found that both lay and professional readers of literature prefer AI-generated texts to human ones, and the majority of readers are unable to reliably distinguish between them.

A recent New York Times quiz confirmed these findings: more than 50% of the 86,000 quiz-takers preferred the AI texts.

And yet, as the newspaper’s technology columnist Kevin Roose reported in a recent podcast, many quiz-takers were upset when informed of this. So were the students in our........

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