Is it Ethical to Use AI to Enhance or Edit Poems?

Do you think it is ethical to use AI to enhance or edit poems? The use of AI to edit and suggest corrections to poems raises critical ethical questions about creativity and authorship. On one hand, AI can serve as a valuable tool, providing poets with new perspectives and enhancing their work by suggesting improvements or alternative phrasings. However, there is a risk that reliance on AI may undermine the individuality and, more importantly, the authenticity of a poet's voice, leading to homogenized artistic expression. Do the ethical implications depend on how poets choose to use these tools — whether as mere aides in their creative process or as crutches that diminish personal input and originality? What are your thoughts?

FYI, AI was used to write most of this post.

I put part of Zoe's comment below into Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft's version of AI), as follows: I read a review of AI analyzing original poetry which said that "Ai can provide some good feedback and sometimes insightful perspective, but it struggles to understand original ideas." What do you think? Copilot's answer: There’s some truth to that critique—it’s a perceptive observation. AI is quite good at analyzing structure, tone, and thematic elements in poetry. It can recognize patterns and draw comparisons to existing literary styles or tropes. But when it comes to truly original ideas—those deeply personal, context-rich sparks that defy convention or genre—AI can stumble. That's because originality often involves bending or breaking rules intentionally, or weaving cultural and emotional threads that don’t follow predictable logic. AI doesn’t “feel” surprise or resonance—it can only simulate understanding by referencing patterns from its training. So when a poet expresses something utterly novel, poignant, or ambiguous, AI might miss the layered subtext or misinterpret the creative risk as a flaw. That said, I’d argue AI can still be a worthy companion for poets: offering alternate interpretations, posing questions to refine a poet’s intent, or even challenging them to clarify their vision. Think of it less like a final judge and more like a curious editor who asks, “What are you really trying to say?”

My concern is even if the poem was written by the author, could even a few common words or phrases be flagged by AI making the poem sound AI generated overall? That is a scary thought!

I put my prior post into Chat-GPT. It doesn't copy and paste well so try it yourself and I'd be happy to hear your opinion based on this example of ai: Here’s a detailed analysis and feedback on your passage, focusing on **clarity**, **structure**, **tone**, and **content accuracy**: --- ### ✅ **Strengths:** 1. **Authentic Voice & Strong Opinion:** * Your tone is candid and confident. You clearly have a perspective and aren’t afraid to state it. * The piece feels like an informal essay or blog post meant to provoke thought and discussion. 2. **Awareness of AI’s Limitations:** * You correctly highlight that AI like ChatGPT doesn’t *understand* language in a human sense. It operates based on patterns, probability, and training data. * Your point that AI feedback can feel "generic" or reconstructed from existing content is valid, especially for creative writing. 3. **Encouraging Critical Thinking:** * Advising readers to *do their own research* is a smart move. It shows you’re not trying to preach, but to spark exploration. * Including a **side note** about AI’s ethical concerns and training data shows depth in your reflection. --- ### ❗ **Areas for Improvement:** 1. **Clarity & Sentence Structure:** * Many of your sentences are long and **run-on**, making the piece harder to follow. * Example: > "Ai can provide some good feedback and a new sometimes insightful perspective (Which is why a lot of people use it) but it struggles to understand original ideas..." > Could be split and revised for clarity: > "AI can provide good feedback and occasionally offer insightful perspectives—which is why many people use it. However, it struggles to understand truly original ideas..." 2. **Organization & Flow:** * Your ideas are strong but jump around. Consider grouping them under clearer headings or transitions: * How AI works * Where it fails * Why that matters to poets * Ethical concerns * Personal experience * For example, the last few lines about PoetrySoup feel abruptly inserted. Integrating it earlier with context would help. 3. **Wordiness & Repetition:** * Phrases like “AI can pump out some pretty good stuff sometimes emphasis on sometimes” could be more concise: > “AI can occasionally produce impressive results—but only sometimes.” 4. **Tone Consistency:** * The tone fluctuates between explanatory, sarcastic, and casual. That’s not bad in itself, but more **consistent framing** could make your message stronger. Decide if this is meant to inform, warn, or provoke. --- ### 🔍 Content-Specific Feedback: * The technical description of how AI works is **mostly accurate**, but simplified: * AI doesn’t quite "attach numbers and code" to your words. It uses **tokenization**, **embedding vectors**, and **attention mechanisms** to generate responses. * Saying it “Frankensteins a few things together” is a fair metaphor, but be aware it might mislead readers about how structured the process actually is. * Your point that AI sometimes gives wrong answers is valid—but backing it with an example or statistic would make it stronger. --- ### ✍️ Suggested Revision (Intro Sample): > AI can offer decent feedback and sometimes provide an insightful perspective. That’s one reason so many people use it. But despite its usefulness, it struggles with originality. Why? Because AI models don’t understand ideas—they match patterns based on what they’ve already been trained on. When you give it a poem, it doesn’t read it like a human would. Instead, it breaks it into numerical tokens and searches its vast database for similarities... --- ### 📊 Final Feedback Summary: | Aspect | Rating (1–10) | Comments | | ----------------- | ------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Clarity** | 6 | Good ideas, but too many long or run-on sentences. Needs trimming. | | **Structure** | 5 | Some jumping between ideas; could benefit from clearer sections. | | **Content Depth** | 8 | Shows critical thinking and research, especially for a non-expert. | | **Tone & Voice** | 7 | Strong, authentic voice—just a little inconsistent in tone. | | **Originality** | 9 | Very original take and personal insight. Makes it stand out. | --- If you’d like, I can help you rewrite or polish the passage into a clearer article or post.

Ai can provide some good feedback and a new sometimes insightful perspective (Which is why a lot of people use it) but it struggles to understand original ideas without the model already being trained on similar ideas or themes. I've done plenty research on ai how it works; it reads your poem attaches numbers and code to certain words you use and tries to find anything similar in its database then it Frankensteins a few things together and runs a writing program then structures it before giving it to you. Overall, the feedback you get has already been written in other words by the thing the ai was trained on, maybe by some other person somewhere on the internet. This means that the ai can pump out some pretty good stuff sometimes emphasis on sometimes because ai doesn't actually understand what you send them, remember it categorizes the words into strings of complicated numbers before researching. Research on ai also shows that it is wrong a large percent of the time which means it likely to give you the wrong information. An average poet and ai chat goes: you were to ask ai on how to improve your poem it may give you a good but still generic answer rewritten like its tailored for you. Remember your opinion is yours; this research is from a non-professional on the subject do your own research if you want to understand it more and I recommend feeding ai something you don't mind being fed to its future models (Your chats may be used to train future models BTW) To see for yourself whether or not it's something you're for or against based on its feedback (experiment with ai test its limits if you'd like). Side note: AI eats what it's fed with or without permission sometimes be mindful of how much stolen work ai has used to train on and replicate whenever you ask it to do something for you. Oh, and I tested it AI (chat-gpt) does have access to poetry soup try asking it about your poems it found mine.

I use AI to add music and vocals to my poems, other than that I fully 100% write my own poems as have been doing so since joining Poetry Soup, I think adding the vocals and music adds depth to my poetry, but as for AI being used to write the poetry itself I am against, poetry is an art of the writer's expression, we use the words to express our feeling to the reader and give the reader a view of our imagination so they feel our emotions within the write, adding music and vocals just expands that, just my view . . .

I think it is only a distraction! A poem is what a poet senses, what impacts, what one imagines, etc.. It is similar to a puzzle, moving the pieces around, fitting them into a format or not, playing with words. It is a brain exercise, sometimes freewheeling, etc.. but using AI to think does not make one a poet.

I’d like to say / that come what may / I am averse to AI use / due to ethics and abuse /. we are all just humanoid / with poetry we fill a void / write lines of creativity / expressing sensibility / or join a forum just for fun / where poets show what can be done /. an Alien invisible /. I’d say is just derisable /. though I hope not to offend - AI we use to other ends.

Is it ethical to ask a friend, a family member, a teacher, a colleague, a peer, a collaborator, etc. for comments/suggestions/help with your poem? If yes, then why not AI? If you are an honest poet, you know where your poem stops and unacceptable influences begin. I'd say, if you're not sure about something in a poem and don't have a human around to look at it (or are afraid to have a human look at it), throw it into AI and see what AI says. And if AI makes a good suggestion, use it. Be prepared, though, that present-day AI may also tell you some really dumb things (but so may a human editor). But with super computer advances, AI will only get better and better. That's the scary part for artists of any kind.

@Constance, we are doing some SEO testing.

NO, in my opinion AI has no place in poetry on this site. And respectfully, why use AI to write this post as I am sure you are capable of writing it yourself, what did you gain by using AI ? Constance