ChatGPT has demonstrated remarkable capabilities on both poetry generation and translation, yet its ability to truly understand poetry remains unexplored. Previous poetry-related work merely analyzed experimental outcomes without addressing fundamental issues of comprehension. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating ChatGPT’s understanding of modern poetry. We collaborated with professional poets to evaluate ChatGPT’s interpretation of unpublished modern Chinese poems by different poets along multiple dimensions. Evaluation results show that ChatGPT’s interpretations align with the original poets’ intents in over 73% of the cases. However, its understanding in certain dimensions, particularly in capturing poeticity, proved to be less satisfactory. These findings highlight the effectiveness and necessity of our proposed framework. This study not only evaluates ChatGPT’s ability to understand modern poetry but also establishes a solid foundation for future research on LLMs and their application to poetry-related tasks.

The rapid development of advanced large language models (LLMs) has made AI-generated text indistinguishable from human-written text. Previous work on detecting AI-generated text has made effective progress, but has not involved modern Chinese poetry. Due to the distinctive characteristics of modern Chinese poetry, it is difficult to identify whether a poem originated from humans or AI. The proliferation of AI-generated modern Chinese poetry has significantly disrupted the poetry ecosystem. Based on the urgency of identifying AI-generated poetry in the real Chinese world, this paper proposes a novel benchmark for detecting LLMs-generated modern Chinese poetry. We first construct a high-quality dataset, which includes both 800 poems written by six professional poets and 41,600 poems generated by four mainstream LLMs. Subsequently, we conduct systematic performance assessments of six detectors on this dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that current detectors cannot be used as reliable tools to detect modern Chinese poems generated by LLMs. The most difficult poetic features to detect are intrinsic qualities, especially style. The detection results verify the effectiveness and necessity of our proposed benchmark. Our work lays a foundation for future detection of AI-generated poetry.