AI Wars - Bard or ChatGPT Poetry Battle

We should first start by stating that here at eBookFairs we love poetry. We also believe that there is much more to poetry than just words thrown together that either rhyme or don't depending upon how a poet is moved and their personal preferences. We know that people are starting to use ChatGPT for creating content but how easy is that to do and are the results really any good? In this week's battle between Bard and ChatGPT we gave the following base prompt to both engines:

The Prompt

"Write a poem about three friends that knew each other their whole lives. They grew up in New York City, went through elementary school, junior high, high school, and even college together. Pick a university that they attended. They went to work for the same company based in New York. Please pick that company. They all worked there for their full careers. They all got married, all had kids, all of their kids have grown up. They all reached retirement age and are now living in the same nursing home. Give these three people names and talk about the grief that they felt as the first one passed away, then the second one, and finally the last one. Make it a sweet story about life-long friendships and living with no regrets." We did then follow up and ask both of the engines to "shorten the poem" and we got the following results:

The Poem from ChatGPT

Three friends named Sam, Jack, and Mike, under skyscrapers, learned to bike, 
Raised in New York, school to school, for every rule they had a trick. 
Went to NYU, shared wisdom gained, to Goldman Sachs they then took flight, 
Hand in hand, they shaped their fate, in the city`s endless night.
Marriage, kids, joys, and strife, together they danced through life, 
In a nursing home, they sat and laughed, forgetting every past strife. 
First Sam left, tears did flow, then Jack followed his shadow, 
Mike alone, held their memory glow, in his heart, their tales of woe.
Yet in death, they did not part, their bond survived, a work of art, 
Three lifelong friends, a single heart, in New York`s soul, they`ve left their mark

The Poem from Bard

From childhood to old age,
Their friendship never aged,
No matter what life threw their way,
They were always there to stay.
Sally, Mary, and Sue,
Met at school and grew,
They went to NYU,
And then worked at IBM too.
They raised their families,
And lived their lives in glee,
And when they died, they left behind,
A legacy of love and kind.
Their friendship will not be forgotten,
For it was a true and rare one,
And they will always be remembered,
As three friends who lived their lives with fun.

The Decision

As we take a look at these two poems, it's important to note how well they both executed the instructions. This also points out some of the challenges the industry and world are going to face. It's really hard to tell the difference between what either of these AI engines generated versus what a human poet would have created. In the end, both of these poems are viable and there is probably a fairly even spread of people that are going to like the one ChatGPT wrote over Bard and vice versa.

From our perspective, we would have to give the win to ChatGPT because of the depth of the poem feeling more human as to us. The Bard poem feels like it is a very surface-level poem. It doesn't feel as robust or as well thought out as the poem from ChatGPT. As always, we would love to get your thoughts and hear your feedback. Which poem do you like better? Do you like them both? Do you hate them both? Are you shocked at all by what they each produced? Either way, we should all get ready to consume content that will be created in these ways. That seems to be inevitable and we urge you to look at our prior article on copyright law to see who owns the copyright to works created this way since the going theory is that AI cannot own it.