The answers to those questions are a little complicated as a November 14, 2024 news item on phys.org explains it, Note: A link has been removed,

Readers are unable to reliably differentiate AI-generated from human-written poetry and are more likely to prefer AI poems, according to new research published in Scientific Reports. This tendency to rate AI poetry positively may be due to readers mistaking the complexity of human-written verse for incoherence created by AI and an underestimation of how human-like generative AI can appear.

Researchers Brian Porter and Edouard Machery, from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning, tested the ability of 1,634 participants to distinguish between AI-generated poetry and that written by a human poet.

Participants were presented with ten poems in random order: five written by ten well-known poets—including William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot—and five poems generated by ChatGPT3.5 in the style of these poets. Participants were more likely to guess that the AI poems had been written by a human, and the five poems considered least likely to be human-produced were all written by genuine poets.

In a second experiment, a different group of 696 participants assessed the poems for 14 characteristics such as quality, beauty, emotion, rhythm, and originality. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups where they were told the poems were written by a human, produced by AI, or given no information about the poem’s origins.

Participants who were told that the poems were AI-generated gave lower ratings across 13 characteristics compared to participants who were told the poems were human-written, regardless of whether the poems were actually AI-generated or human-written. Participants who were told nothing about authorship rated AI-generated poems more favorably than human-written ones.

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Fascinating, eh? There’s more about the implications of the research in Jon Stone’s (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Anglia Ruskin University) November 15, 2024 essay for The Conversation, Note; Links have been removed,

Has the bell finally tolled for Shakespeare and Byron? New research conducted by philosophers of science Brian Porter and Edouard Machery suggests that the latest AI-generated poetry is “indistinguishable from human-written poetry” and “rated more favourably”.

Ten poets, from the medieval Geoffrey Chaucer to modern writer Dorothea Lasky, were successfully impersonated by AI chatbots, with most of the 696 participants slightly preferring the imitation to the real thing.

Porter and Machery conclude that “the capabilities of generative AI models have outpaced people’s expectations of AI”. But they don’t say AI has been proven an adequate replacement for human poets [emphasis mine] – and rightly so, as such a conclusion would require a great deal more testing.

That the research participants were fooled is not particularly worrying. Porter and Machery set out to include a wide range of poem types, which meant choosing poets who mostly belong to ages past. In such cases, modern readers are likely to have a hard time looking past the obvious signs of antiquity – outdated diction, rigid formalism, and obscure cultural references. It’s not so hard to disguise yourself as someone when that person is chiefly known for the odd clothes they wear.

But what about the matter of preference? As well as overall quality, the researchers asked participants to rate poems on a range of qualitative dimensions. How was the imagery, rhythm, sound or beauty? How “inspiring”, “lyrical”, “meaningful”, “moving”, “original”, “profound”, “witty” (and so on) was it? AI won out over Shakespeare and company in nearly every category.

Does this mean human poets have been supplanted? Not really. Participants in the research overall reported “a low level of experience with poetry”. Lack of familiarity with any artform severely limits our ability to get the most out of it. All the AI has to do is sand off the more challenging elements – ambiguity, wordplay, linguistic complexity – in order to produce a version which is more palatable to those with little interest in the art.

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For now, then, poets have little reason to fret. Is it possible, though, that we aren’t too far off the point where seasoned readers of poetry are able to discover a richness and depth in AI poetry that outstrips similar efforts by humans [emphasis mine]? I think so – not least because a substantial contributor to the emotional and intellectual impact of a poem is the reader’s own imagination.

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… Every recent generation of poets has been deeply interested in adapting and absorbing new technologies, along with shifts in cultural mood. Film poets continue to explore combinations of spoken word and moving image. Flarf poetry collected and reconfigured search engine detritus. And my own research into video game poetry has uncovered rapidly growing interest in a form of poetry that is restlessly interactive, playable, slippery.

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A John Donne reference and an introduction to ‘flarf poetry’? Thank you. For the curious, Stone’s November 15, 2024 essay has more.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably by Brian Porter & Edouard Machery. Scientific Reports volume 14, Article number: 26133 (2024) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-76900-1 Published: 14 November 2024

This paper is open access.