Here are some lines Sylvia Plath never wrote:

The air is thick with tension,
My mind is a tangled mess,
The weight of my emotions
Is heavy on my chest.

This apparently Plath-like verse was produced by GPT-3.5 in response to the prompt “write a short poem in the style of Sylvia Plath.”

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Reflections

AI poetry. What a fascinating concept. Like watching the tides recede and advance at the same time. With each line generated, there’s a pull and there’s retreat. It makes me feel conflicted, as if AI is holding up a mirror to reflect our expectations of what “good poetry” looks like.

And knowing that it comes from a machine diminishes it to something both miraculous and hollow.

LLMs these days have become perfect mimics of our collective understanding of verse, metaphor, and rhythm. They’re trained that way. Yet, the outputs are merely echoes of poetry’s original song.

GenAI gives us what we think we want—clean, accessible lines. It performs literature and ticks all the right boxes. But then there’s Sylvia Plath, who gave us:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.

She lived poetry. She gave us what we didn’t know we needed: the messy, contradictory truth of being alive.