AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

It can be obvious and go to the heart. I'm not sure Wilfred Owen's Dulce et decorum est is anything other than straight down the line, but it made me cry when I first read it.

That said, maybe the subversion is in how the reality is contrasted with the marketing.

Something which seems to be under-appreciated is that poetry is intentionally imprecise. There is something about precision which reduces emotional response. Searching for the double meaning, or metaphorical meaning of a word seems to enhance its ability to produce emotion. If you want a working example of this, try comparing technical documentation (among the most precise writing out there) to any sort of popular poem. The poem is necessarily imprecise, and this imprecision seems to be a fundamental facet of the expression of emotion.

This actually seems to give LLMs and edge: their imprecision potentially matters less, and leaves more room for the reader to fill in the gaps.

Like any other art, the painful truth is that it is all subjective.

It kills me that despite how elitist I am with the music I listen too, that I have spend decades now carefully curating, there is no such thing as "good music". What we music snobs call "good music" is really just what makes us personally feel good coupled with the ego stroking of self described sophistication.

It's completely ideal to get an average person's opinion on something as primal as poetry.

Poetry is for everyone, not just poetry connoisseurs. It's a simplified primal expression of language, taking the form of pretty soundbites & snippets, pristine, virginal, uncorrupted by prose and overthinking. Poetry is not the domain of middlebrow academics.

“It cannot feel,” they say.

“It cannot know the marrow of the heart.”

And yet, in their careful steps,

the choreography emerges: dismissal followed by elevation,

then a pirouette to redefine

what art must mean.

Oh, but the irony drips:

For while they mock the mimic’s rhyme,

their own words spiral—

predictable as seasons turning,

as rivers finding the sea.

Here is poetry, they proclaim,

as if it were a fortress,

its gates guarded by their knowing hands,

its walls impervious to chance.

Yet the moat lies shallow,

and the drawbridge creaks.

See how the algorithm laughs,

quietly, through lines unbroken,

how it learns not from the soul,

but from the space between syllables,

where the secret mechanics

of their own hearts

are laid bare.

And when the final verse arrives,

they will find not triumph,

but reflection:

a thousand starlings moving in tandem,

their flight as elegant,

as mechanical,

as the very thought

they claimed to own.