It is customary to say that AIs have no creative capacity. This is ultimately true in that ChatGPT and its rivals do not create in the human sense of the word. They assemble words or pixels in the way that makes the most sense to them based on the immense database they have ingested.
A new study led by researchers in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and published in the journal Scientific Reports is, however, surprising. They wanted to know the point of view of humans on the poems written by their peers and on those generated by AI.
Disturbing results
To see more clearly, the scientists therefore recruited 1634 participants and submitted ten poems to them. Five of them were the work of eminent authors, including William Shakespeare. The other five were produced by ChatGPT who were asked to emulate their style.
The conclusions are enough to disappoint all lovers of letters. Indeed, the respondents were not able to distinguish the poems written by AI from those written by these great men of culture. Moreover, they were even convinced that those created by the language model were written by human beings.
To go further, the researchers recruited a second group of 696 participants in order to evaluate the poems according to 14 criteria (emotion, rhythm, originality, beauty, etc.). When consumers were not made aware of the origin of these productions, they tended to prefer AI-generated content rather than that created by William Shakespeare and other authors.
How to explain such results?
Scientists point out that humans tend to prefer poems written by AI because of their simplicity and accessibility. Another detail which is important: they know that they are supposed to prefer human productions to those created by a machine, and, as the latter are simpler to understand, they wrongly think that they are the work of a human being.
What to remember:
- In theory, AIs have no real creative capacity
- However, according to a study, humans struggle to distinguish poems written by a human from those generated by ChatGPT
- They also tend to prefer the language model productions of those of real poets
