Artificial intelligence is better at writing poems than William Shakespeare, a bizarre new study has found [Video]

PEOPLE prefer poems written by artificial intelligence to works by famous writers like Shakespeare and Lord Byron, a study has found.

Readers rated virtual verse as more emotional, creative and beautiful — until they found it was churned out by a bot.

Scientists think rhymes written by algorithms use simpler language, so people enjoy them more than complicated old classics.

They tested the effects on 2,300 people who were not poetry experts — and found readers could not tell the difference.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, Pittsburgh University’s Brian Porter said: “Like AI-generated paintings and faces, AI poems are now ‘more human than human’.

“We find people rate AI-generated poems more highly. However, they evaluate them more negatively when told the poem is AI generated.”

His study used poems by William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, …