I tend to prefer poetry with metre too, but free verse is popular now, and doesn't always stick to a metre. You get things like Marianne Moore's 'Poetry' that just don't have any metre at all, or TS Elliott's 'The Waste Land' that flirts with lots of metres but is ultimately faithful to none of them.

I agree? My favourite poem has barely any rhymes. And the AI actually manages rhymes fairly often ("If a man be true and of humble heart / Then none can deny him his rightful part / Love will lead him through the dark of night / And show him the truth that lies before his sight" is AI).

But that's not why poems were easier. It tends to be far easier to identify a poet's style from a brief snippet, and the AI has some trouble even keeping to a consistent metre, let alone riffing on it in a sensible way. Some modern poetry might not bother with metre at all, but that wasn't really a thing for Byron and Wordsworth, and it definitely wasn't for Shakespeare.

Also, every word of a really good poem is usually carefully chosen, because a word out of place stands out like a dropped note in a song. Whereas you can have passages that seem fairly out of place in a novel without overly damaging the overall work. Partly because prose focuses more than poetry on the meanings of the words, and far less on the sound of them. And partly because poetry just tends to be shorter.

You can identify a lot of the AI poetry by reading it aloud and realising it just doesn't sound good. At all.

Likewise, the ideas in the poetry are easier to judge. A passage from a book might tell us 'It was 13 O'clock in April', whereas a poem might tell us that 'April is the cruelest month, it mixes memory and desire'. The AI seems reasonably capable of imitating the factual kind of statement, but less capable of meaningfully dealing with more abstract value judgements. And when it tries you get things like "Through the darkness I forge, To a life I must endure, For this is my journey, My heart must be sure."

Even aside from the fact that it sounds bad, that is the kind of deep meaning I'd expect from a song written by a 13 year old emo whose parents just don't understand. Not Lord Byron.

Really? I'd argue that for people who aren't musically trained, things like AIVA are extremely hard to identify. Possibly harder than most AI pictures. Obviously it's rarely going to fool someone actually trained in classical music (or worse classical music and AI), but as the results here show, that's roughly true of paintings and literature too. Trained experts can identify them consistently, untrained people often have trouble.

I'm not sure this would be terribly convincing unless the professors in question are routinely setting 100 word essays on 'whatever'. In general a one sentence quotation of unknown surrounding context is always going to be much harder to identify as being from an AI than 5000 words on a known topic that have to be self-contained.

72/100 on English literature. In general: poetry was a lot easier to answer than prose (even for authors I'm less familiar with), while shorter passages were predictably harder. My accuracy also got higher as I answered more questions, and I wonder if it might be harder if not all the AI quotes were from GPT-3.

A few questions were bugged and just didn't give me a quotation, and including James Joyce's Ulysses is definitely cheating.