Oh, the humanity! - Di11y Da11y's Blog

The site is riddled with AI and it's a riddle if the winners of contests are now AI or human. It's tempting to shut up shop and forget about poetry. What can we do to try and save the site?

Gleaned from popular opinion

• AI is ruining poetry from the perspective of sharing humanity.
• It is stopping human written poems from placing in contests (because AI written poetry isn't bad poetry but it is a scam)
• It's damaging engagement because the AI scammers do love a compliment on their 'skill' (and being taken for a fool kind of puts people off bothering again once the truth comes out).

Before we think of what we can do to counter it, here's some truths we need to bear in mind.

Current situation

• AI detection tools are flawed - you'll get false negatives and false positives. However, you wouldn't expect someone's back catalogue (or the equivalent of a back catalogue, but posted in four minutes flat, to all flag as AI)
• AI poetry is often formulaic, it's too mechanically 'clever'. Plus for contests you'll see that AI entries often follow a similar blueprint but with different word/concept choices but the patterns are discernible. They leap off the page as obvious AI once you become familiar with it.
• This might not be always true, but an AI poet seems to LOVE the double bluff and nearly every reply will mention the length of time they took to write and reference fondly "their" poem with stated ownership - what gives fraud face! It's not your work if it was generated or rewritten by a bot! (Sorry not sorry).

So, what can we actually do?

Well, I've noticed how many real poets are becoming disinclined to post and then when they return to the site they find there's nothing worth reading.

We'll need to reverse this direction of travel.

Many of the poets using AI flood the new poems list with their "talent". I mean every one is a masterpiece worthy of sharing, how could they not?! So, it might be helpful if you click the "view ONE new poem per poet" button then it refines the list and with this view it enables you to more easily scan for your favourite poets that are currently being lost amid the poem dumping of AI users.

What's a real poet to do?

So, we get to the point I wanted to make. If we stop posting our genuine poetry (which doesn't have to be perfect) then all the real writers and readers of poetry will drift away, put off by just AI offerings. There needs to be a reason to stay and that reason is likely to be why you joined in the first place - authentic poetry sharing.

I personally have just a small circle of favourites, so I'm not going to advocate that we must act out of our comfort zone and start commenting wildly to raise engagement. Each of us will have our own set of poets we enjoy reading, let's just proceed with sharing our poetry and commenting genuinely when we've enjoyed a poem or found it thought provoking. Replying to comments to acknowledge seems common decency, however, expectations for reciprocal commenting shouldn't be the norm or a highly pressured feature of the site. Let people enjoy or not, comment or not. What goes around usually comes around and it'll work out, but posting real poetry on whatever is a regular basis for you is a necessity.

Contests

Unfortunately, there aren't any answers with regard to the contests having high placing AI poems. Several sponsors have tried to have contests that are difficult for AI to generate entries for but that is getting more and more difficult and isn't foolproof. Neither is using AI checkers. So, whilst a keen eye will help, all I can think is perhaps we just enter contests for the fun of it, use titles that identify when something is a contest write and enjoy the engagement and camaraderie that comes with it. Let beating AI to the top spots be an added bonus rather than a point of contention. I think there's a lesson here about enjoying the process - the writing and sharing.

The sponsors are fallible and the scammers are believable. But all need not be lost if we adjust what is important to us about the site. Which for me is reading poetry that means something because it was written by another genuine human and being read by another human who also gets that.

NB: Unfortunately, AI poetry is not the only thing deterring an honest poet. I'm perfectly happy with discussion but if there's any hate or it gets uncomfortable I'll just delete the blog. My motivation is just to try and reinvigorate the site.