If you are thinking of using AI in any way in the writing of your poem, please read the following first.
FOR TEACHERS: You can decide whether or not the use of AI is appropriate for your students. Please see the class plan in For teachers for more details, and also an extra idea for including AI as part of the class.
For 2025, if you use AI in any form in the creation of your poem, you must include the following with your entry:
- State which AI generator you used.
- Provide a detailed description of how AI was used in the creation of your poem. Maximum 500 words. Even if you only used AI to ask about the grammatical structure, or how to use a particular word, for example, you should state this. (You can always use a dictionary, ask a teacher, or do an online search instead.)
If you do not declare the use of AI, and the judges suspect its use, it will be scanned by GPTZero to check the probability of it having been written by AI, and if this is high it will be automatically rejected.
Note for Under-16s: If you think it will be easier to get ChatGPT or Gemini to write your poem, you might want to think it through! For your poem to be considered for Given Words, you’ll have to submit not just the poem, but also include a detailed explanation of how you used AI to create it. Poems that have been written by AI without any creative input from the participant are unlikely to be considered.
In 2024 I decided to allow AI in the creation of poems with the proviso that its use is acknowledged when the poem is submitted. I had limited resources to scan every poem for AI use, so decided to rely on the honesty of participants. This wasn’t used to filter out poems made with AI, although to my knowledge none of the poems published on Given Words were made with AI. Maybe this is because poets develop their own personal way of writing and coming up with their ideas, whereas AI doesn’t have a personal lived experience to draw on. You can ask AI to write a poem in a particular style, or form, with or without rhyme, including all five words, and following the Given Words rules, and it will do it, but this won’t be your own personal poem, and this is usually pretty obvious to regular readers of poetry.
Nevertheless, a year on and ChatGPT has got a little better at writing poetry. [See ChatGPT firm reveals AI model that is ‘good at creative writing’ in the Guardian, 12 March 2025.] The difficulty when it comes to a competition like Given Words, is that we wish to celebrate the poets who participate rather than a machine which has produced the poem for the participant. I can’t say the best way to use AI when writing poetry, but I imagine a poem developing out of a back and forth conversation with AI, or particular lines being taken from a conversation and used to construct a poem, or a combination of instructions that produces something unexpected, or maybe a poem written jointly with AI where you take turns to write a line. If you do use AI then I suggest you try to find a creative and surprising way to use it to produce something new and exciting.
As a writer, there are questions that arise around the ethics of using a tool trained on copyrighted material [See Tens of thousands of creatives sign petition against unlicensed generative AI training in ABC News, 9 April 2025]. Many writers choose not to use AI because of this. Do Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT learn from this material and then write texts based on the learning, or is the copyrighted material they have studied retained within the model?
Another question is: Who owns the copyright of an AI produced text? The answer can vary according to each country’s laws. Copyright Licensing New Zealand states in their Fact Sheet: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright that ‘section 5(2)(a) the Copyright Act 1994 contemplates the creation of works purely by computer; here the person who undertook understood the arrangements to create the computer-generated work is deemed to be its “author”. So, a work created using a generative AI tool could potentially be protected by copyright on this basis, provided that the other requirements in the Act are met.’
There are also questions around the environmental impact, particularly regarding energy and water resources used in creating Large Language Models. For more information see the article Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT NEWS, 17 Jan 2025.)
And this is an interesting one to ponder: AI poetry rated better than poems written by humans, study shows from the Guardian, 18 Nov 2024. And if you'd like to reflect on the future of LLMs, how about Yann LeCun, Pioneer of AI, Thinks Today's LLM's Are Nearly Obsolete in Newsweek, 2 April 2025.
If, after considering all this, you still wish to use AI in the creation of your poem, we'll look forward to reading your work and seeing what you, together with AI, have created.
If you have any comments or questions, feel free to write to nzgivenwords@gmail.com
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