Every year on March 21, UNESCO celebrates World Poetry Day. Adopted in 1999, the occasion honours poets and pays tribute to expanding linguistic variety and sharing oral traditions through poetic forms.
Poetry is believed to have originated thousands of years ago and has been kept alive through oral and written forms. There are numerous poetic forms that exist in the world with different structures across cultures.
What are some different kinds of poetry?
Below are just some of the most common forms of poetry.
- Haiku: a three-line poem with a syllable count of five, then seven, then five.
- Limerick: a humorous five-line poem.
- Sonnet: a 14-line poem usually written in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme.
- Villanelle: a 19-line poem consisting of five three-lined stanzas and a final quatrain.
- Free verse: poetry without a set structure or rhyme scheme.
- Ghazal: an Arabic and Persian form of poetry with a specific rhyming pattern.
- Prose poetry: poetry written in prose form rather than verse.
- Ode: a poem that celebrates a person, place, thing or event.
- Sestina: a 39-line poem with six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line concluding stanza.
- Epic: a long narrative poem.
Can AI generate poetry?
Poetry is often considered one of the most artistic forms of human expression. With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, Al Jazeera put ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, to the test to see how it would perform in poetry.
ChatGPT uses natural language processing (NLP), an AI technology that can perform various tasks such as answering questions, summarising text and even generating lines of code.
In order to train ChatGPT, large amounts of text data from articles, blogs, websites and other publicly available text content, were added to the model. The model was then trained to predict the probability of the next word in a sequence with remarkable human-like capabilities.
Below we compare an AI-generated villanelle with Dylan Thomas’s famous Do not go gentle into that good night.
Bot or not?
We know poetry is subjective, but why don’t you take the 10-question quiz below to rate ChatGPT’s poetic prowess? Select whether you think a human wrote the poem or if it was AI-generated.
Scroll to view more questions.
