Sure, most can’t tell T S Eliot From AI Eliot

How would you react if in a study, a large number of people are found to prefer ketchup with their chowmein, or cola with their whisky? We’d guess if you aren’t one yourself, you’d think of them as philistines, the kind who prefers watching a ball being thwacked over the boundary via a ‘jhadu’ shot than by an impeccably pivoted hook. So, after reading University of Pittsburgh researchers Brian Porter and Edouard Machery‘s study, ‘AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favourably’, published last week in Nature’s Scientific Reports, hold your horses before you conclude that AI is coming out with great poetry in the style of 10 English language poets that includes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T S Eliot and Sylvia Plath. The clue lies in the word ‘indistinguishable’ in the study’s title – indistinguishable for whom?

And there you have it. Random folks whose idea and appreciation of poetry is as developed Insta reel viewers. This is not to diss AI. One day, surely, it will be able to create something as delicate as a Ghalib couplet. But, as of now, as the researchers admit, most people prefer poems ‘more straightforward’, ‘accessible’ and having standard notions of being beautiful of the Hallmark greeting card lines variety. Ergo, indistinguishable from Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and his lot.