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