I built an AI poem generator. I wasn’t prepared for how people would use it

Lots of people claim that writing poetry is something only humans can do. It requires emotion, wordcraft, and the unique body of painful, jubilant lived experience that only a person can accumulate.

To which I say, “phooey.”

Poems are words. And today’s Large Language Models are incredibly good at manipulating words. An AI should be able to beat the Poes and Frosts of the world at their own game.

To put that theory into practice, I teamed up with my friend Jared Bauman, built an AI-powered poem generator, and released it into the world for anyone to discover and use.

I never expected what people would do with it. Here’s what happened.

Powerful calculators

Jared and I have worked together on various AI projects for years, and used to co-host a podcast about niche website building.

On the podcast, we often dissected the performance of a specific type of website: the calculator site.

If you’ve ever converted something to title case, checked the number of characters in a chunk of text before pasting it into an online form, or ballparked the monthly mortgage payment for your boss’ house via a price you found on Zillow, you’ve used a calculator site.

These simple sites often generate ungodly amounts of traffic and revenue. We’ve looked at simple calculators that can earn north of $10,000 per month.

Despite their huge reach, though, most calculator sites are built around just a few lines of code. With the rise of generative AI, we felt we could do better. 

What if a calculator-style site could generate paragraphs of creative text, rather than just doing simple math? What if it could–for example–write a poem?

Poets in code

To build out this idea, we registered a domain with somewhat tortured phrasing but good keywords (PoemAIGenerator.com), called up ChatGPT, and vibe-coded a simple web interface in less than an hour.

I then used OpenAI’s Assistants platform to create a basic, LLM-powered poem generator, while Jared built out the site’s SEO framework.

The Assistants platform essentially lets you create your own version of ChatGPT, tailored to a specific use case, and accessible via an API–the standard way that developers connect applications together.

We didn’t want people to hijack our poem generator and use it to hack the Pentagon. Using Assistants let me build a capable system that leverages OpenAI’s powerful frontier models, while specifying rules, parameters and instructions that keep the system in check and on task.

We agreed on some rules for the poem generator, which I built into the Assistant. It should refuse to generate offensive poems, for example, and should keep everything G-rated. It should also refuse requests to include personal information or to target individual people.

Beyond safety rules, I wanted the poem generator to adapt itself to any poetry style users threw at it. If a user asked for a haiku, it would provide the requisite 17 syllables. If they wanted an iambic pentameter in the style of Maya Angelou, it would oblige.

The end result is extremely simple–it takes in an idea, and spits out a poem.

We connected everything up, launched the site in April of 2025, and promptly forgot about it. For a while, nothing happened. Then, all at once, things changed.

Hundred of poets

For reasons that still evade us, users suddenly discovered Poem AI Generator. And once they found it, they started using it–a lot.

The site is designed to display each generated poem publicly (this is disclosed on the homepage, so people don’t send anything too private or sensitive). 

The public nature of the site lets people share their poems with others. But it also provides a record of the kinds of topics people want transformed into AI poetry. And that record is fascinating.

Originally, I expected people to enter simple keywords into the site. And indeed, many people do just that. “Nature”, “Christmas” and “Cats” are among the topics people have turned into poems, often more than once.

But many of the poems are far more interesting–and specific. 

“A cricket in the room where my wife and I watch television that keeps ticking, ticking, ticking” is a personal favorite, as is “Texas plumber, green hair, ugly, false teeth.”

One user asked for a poem about “The Love of Toes After an Injury”, and then–apparently unsatisfied–returned to ask for “The Love of Toes After an Injury in the Style of Poe.”

Lots of people appear to use the site for practical purposes. Poems written to loved ones, birthday messages, and the like appear frequently. We saw a big surge of poems around Valentine’s day. Lots of people clearly use it to make funny poems for their kids.

But many requests are far more melancholy and emotional. “How Do I Learn to Say Goodbye” is heartbreaking–both the poem itself, and my imagination of the person asking for it. Poems such as “Fade away like ink in the rain” and “Vulnerability and love” are surprisingly lyrical.

Overall, I expected some funny limericks, and perhaps an anniversary poem here and there. Instead, what we got was people pouring out their hearts and souls to our anonymous, AI-powered computer.

Sympathy for the builders

I learned a lot from our strange little experiment. For starters, I remain steadfast in my belief that AI can write good poetry. 

Yes, Poem AI Generator tends towards four-line stanzas and an ABAB rhyme scheme, unless it’s specifically asked to write something else. But so do many human poets. And at least the system is very good at rhyming! 

Some lines are genuinely moving, though. Meditating on love, the system wrote “Love is the hush between two words unsaid/ A lantern’s glow cast warm on winter’s night/ The silent art of dreams beneath a thread/ Of whispered hope that softens every plight.” 

I’ve read far worse descriptions of the emotion.

Beyond the poems itself, building Poem AI Generator gave me a new appreciation for the immense challenges faced by frontier model builders like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Most professionally-oriented, productivity-focused people (for instance, the audience of FastCompany) use chatbots for high-minded, businessy tasks.

We hone an email, reformat a spreadsheet, or–if we’re really bold–ask an AI agent to book us a flight to Maui. 

And when we imagine the kinds of queries that the average user types into a modern chatbot, we picture the same kind of thing.

In building Poem AI Generator, I saw firsthand the kinds of requests people on the open Internet actually put into AI bots. And they’re far wilder, more ambiguous, and difficult to make sense of than I’d imagined.

If people are keying things like “Mystical Majical Stories Of Old New Arises Bright And Bold Stardust And Fairies Dragons And More Inspire Create A Story Folklore Dazzling Details Mythical Flare Inspire Create Your Story Here” into our humble little public poem website and expecting a clever result, I can only imagine what they’re sharing with Claude or ChatGPT behind closed doors.

To build a system which can write passable Python code or create a logo for your off-the-books pressure washing company is one thing. 

Providing a useful response to a request like “Twenty Friends Enjoying Three Kinds Of Delicious Pizza Served By Cesar In A Lovely Mexican Evening” is quite another. Model builders must process those kinds of queries every day–and others which are far more concerning and nefarious. It must be an immense task.

More encouragingly, though, building Poem AI Generator gave me a sense of AI’s power to help people process challenges and celebrate joyful experiences.

Perhaps because our site is anonymous and relies on machines instead of human poets,  people clearly felt comfortable pouring out complex feelings to it. 

Reading through the poems feels a bit like perusing a modern, AI-mediated version of Post Secret. There’s joy, sorrow, longing, and cats–sometimes in the same poem!

I doubt that Poem AI Generator changed anyone’s life, or even altered their opinions about poetry. 

But reading and writing poems is all about processing the complex, challenging, contradictory emotions that come along with being human. 

If our AI provided an outlet for people to do that work in even a cursory way, I consider the project a big success. Or to put it in Haiku form:

Silent keys unlock  

new rivers of thought and hope—  

machine heart, helps heal.