AI Can Draft. Humans Feel. Lessons From the 10th Shanghai International Poetry Festival
The 10th Shanghai International Poetry Festival ran from December 6-9 along the Huangpu River. Poets from around the world met to press a sharp question: Can artificial intelligence write poetry like a human?
Technology stood next to tradition-tools beside voice. The throughline: poetry remains a human act, even as machines get better at patterns.
The opening, the award, and a reminder of why poetry matters
The festival opened on a cruise at the West Bund waterfront. This year's Golden Magnolia Poetry Award went to Xie Mian, a renowned Chinese poet and professor at Peking University.
He put it plainly: "In this age of highly developed materialism, the great abundance of materialistic items makes us miss poetry especially. Our hobby poetry can improve ourselves spiritually, and provide spiritual enjoyment. Putting material enjoyment in a secondary position, the first and most important thing is spiritual enjoyment and spiritual development."
What poets said about AI
Under the theme "The Age of AI, The Path of Poetry," the discussion focused on where AI helps-and where it falls short. French poet Sonia Bressler was direct: "Artificial intelligence does not really exist. What exists is algorithm. It's purely mathematical probabilities. People think they can ask AI for a poem, but it will only be a reproduction. It is not a creation."
She added, "Poetry is something we create ourselves in intimacy that is, something that comes from within us. AI might help us rephrase something, but it will not create poetry itself. The danger is making people believe it can."
German poet Matthias Politycki agreed: "Intelligence tries to produce poetry, but the most important thing is missing the emotion that makes you write. If it was artificial emotion, that would be something completely different."
Machines can handle rhythm, structure, and even mimic tone. What they lack is lived experience and a reason to write beyond prediction.
Poetry's job in public life
Chilean poet Mario Meléndez offered a compass for writers: "The poet is a translator of his time; the artist, in general, is a translator of his time. There is a moral, social, and political obligation to translate what is happening in the world."
That standard is hard to outsource. Poetry witnesses. It interprets. It risks saying what others won't.
Practical takeaways for working writers
- Use AI for surfaces, not the core: outlines, form suggestions, synonym sweeps, and line counts. Keep meaning, motif, and emotional truth in your hands.
- Create a short "voice file" (themes, diction, favorite turns) and paste it into prompts to keep consistency when you experiment.
- Split the process: have AI brainstorm metaphors or constraints; you do the scene, image selection, and final cuts for cadence and surprise.
- Run an "emotion check" before you publish: What lived moment is this grounded in? If none, go get one-memory, conversation, place, or a sensory detail you can feel.
- Ethics matter: follow submission rules and disclose assistance where required.
A simple workflow that keeps your voice intact
- Intention: write a one-sentence "why this poem must exist."
- Constraint: choose a form or rule (syllable count, anaphora, tercets). AI can suggest options and examples.
- Material: draft three lived images or moments that carry feeling-no abstractions.
- Assist: ask AI to propose variants on meter or line breaks; ignore what dulls the spark.
- Cut: remove the first cliché you see in every stanza. Replace with a concrete, specific detail.
- Read aloud: fix rhythm by ear, not by model.
For context and further study
If you want a sober look at what current systems can and can't do creatively, this overview is useful: Can AI be creative?.
For writers experimenting with tooling, start here: AI tools for copywriting. Use them for scaffolding-never as the final voice.
The line that separates us from the machine
AI predicts text. Writers choose risk. That difference shows up in metaphor that hurts a little, in silence you leave on the page, and in the choice to say something true even when it's inconvenient.
Use the tools. Protect the voice. As the festival made clear, poetry lives where probability ends and experience begins.
Your membership also unlocks:
