How to spot a ChatGPT-prompted/AI-generated poem

Hi. Would you like me to write a poem for you?😁

Statement

Ladies and gentlemen, despite my competition rules stating no AI content allowed, last year, during my Nature & You Poetry Competition, a Nigerian contestant who was placed fourth, awarded $10 USD, offered a contract and published in our anthology, has had his poem flagged up on social media as AI-generated. It has since been reasonably established that his poem: 'The House of Water,' was created using generative-AI. In addition, it appears to contain lines plagiarized from online articles, cited below.

Both his poem and that of another Nigerian poet, have been deleted from the manuscript of the republished anthology.

I offer my profuse apology to all other poets in the collection. I've now undertaken online training on how to spot AI-assisted writing or co-writing.

B. James.

---

Summary

In this article I will demonstrate how two contestants who submitted fake poems were caught by readers in England, months after an anthology featuring the winning poems of the 2025 Annual Bridgette James Poetry competition was published.

I will put forward the following pieces of evidence to show that the House of Water poem was AI-generated.

1.      Title matched to a novel: The House of Water

2.      Mechanical and technical style of writing in sharp contrast with authorial style of poet under discussion

3.      A story told in the poem that doesn’t gel or make much sense

4.      LLM vocabulary used in other generative-AI text

5.      Plagiarised phrases in poem from earlier articles found online: archives/inactive page belonging to Back Country Blog Post, created in August 2009, when the poet must’ve been little

6.      Complex internal rhyme scheme

7.      Collaborative evidence the t the poet-in-question knows how to use AI and didn’t attribute the work of others to them.

8.      Al-hallucinations

As evidenced, it's becoming increasingly harder for editors like myself to detect AI.

Scan Results

Up to four Generative AI-detection tools, flagged up the 'House of Water Poem'.

100% Confident That's AI We are 100% confident that the text scanned is AI-generated, NOT to be interpreted as 100% of the text produced is AI-generated.

Source: http://Originality.ai

GPTZero AI Detection

Model 2026-03-11-base

We are highly confident this text was AI generated

Entry no 30466 Shortlisted (The Bridgette James Poetry Competition, 2025)

POEM:

The House of Water

We build where the soil remembers water. [Exact phrase found in an online report by the British Ecological Society]

In the rainy season, the streets of {Lagos} turn to rivers— [The noun: Lagos was probably inserted by the poet.]

whole houses drink until their bones sag,

their skins soaked in the wet breath of the flood.

In Lagos, the rain comes like a memory—

old as the riverbed, filling the air with its song.

Houses drink from the flood, their walls swelling,

soft as clay that remembers the hands that shaped it. [Weak, cliched simile, found in Large Language Models /LLMs like ChatGPT. Lines similar to text in a report by the British Ecological Society]

Each year, the flood sweeps in, not as a conqueror but as a visitor, [Parallel construction: not his but that]

its waterline traced in mud, in stories passed down like inherited land. [Its + Its – LLMs favour this phrase: It’s not this…it’s that]

Even the walls grow soft as if remembering their origin in the earth,

as if they want to return to the clay they were shaped from, [The phrases soft and the clay are used more than once by a LLM trying to rewrite a sentence /line while trying hard not to repeat the same words.]

to sleep once more in the belly of the land. [Probably written by poet]

Roof beams tilt in prayer to the sky, the walls softened by silt, [Nonsensical phrasing; soft is repeated as a participle adjective]

as if waiting for the river to speak again,

to leave behind not ruin but the promise of fertile soil, [Parallel construction: not this but that] & maybe green shoots. (And, probably changed to an ampersand by the poet)

But the flood leaves its taste behind, in the corners, in the cracks. [Phrase found in other AI-generated poems]

We live on with it in our lungs, learning to swim in the dust

until the rains come again.

We live inside this thirst. The water knows every crack, [Phrase found in other AI-generated poems]

seeping into the bones of our homes,

turning them soft, pliant. The roof sags, the walls bend [Listing of adjectives and repeating soft again]

like knees in prayer— a kind of surrender. [Em-dash overuse]

We walk between houses that lean into silence, [Nonsensical phrasing]

their ribs fragile, yet holding on— just like us, holding on.

Feedback: Every thing in this Ai-poem does too much. My head spun, reading it.

The following words/phrases - also found in the contestant's poem - occur frequently in

AI-generated poems about floods

Try this experiment please to validate my claims, ask Chat GPT to give you a free verse poem about floods. (See gallery below)

• visitor

• silt

• creeps into our homes

• memories/memory

• soft

• silence

• the water

• behind

• breath

  
  

NUMBERED LINES

Entry no 30466

Shortlisted 4/5

The House of Water 

1.      We build where the soil remembers water.

2.      In the rainy season, the streets of Lagos turn to rivers—

3.      whole houses drink until their bones sag,

4.      their skins soaked in the wet breath of the flood.

5.      In Lagos, the rain comes like a memory—

6.      old as the riverbed, filling the air with its song.

7.      Houses drink from the flood, their walls swelling,

8.      soft as clay that remembers the hands that shaped it.

9.      Each year, the flood sweeps in, not as a conqueror but as a visitor,

10.  its waterline traced in mud, in stories passed down like inherited land.

11.  Even the walls grow soft as if remembering their origin in the earth,

12.  as if they want to return to the clay they were shaped from,

13.  to sleep once more in the belly of the land.

14.  Roof beams tilt in prayer to the sky, the walls [softened by silt,]

15.  as if waiting for the river to speak again,

16.  to leave behind not ruin but the promise of fertile soil,

17.  & maybe green shoots.

18.  But the flood leaves its taste behind, in the corners, in the cracks.

19.  We live on with it in our lungs, learning to swim in the dust

20.  until the rains come again.

21.  We live inside this thirst. The water knows every crack,

22.  seeping into the bones of our homes,

23.  turning them soft, pliant. The roof sags, the walls bend

24.  like knees in prayer— a kind of surrender.

25.  We walk between houses that lean into silence,

26.  their ribs fragile, yet holding on— just like us, holding on.

The story the poem tells is contradictory. It has been shown in the UK that AI poems often fail to make sense. AI-generated poetry doesn’t resonate emotionally because they are designed to predict the most statistically likely sequence of words, rather than express genuine human experience, emotion, or intentional meaning.

Now read these lines below together; see how the LLM reshuffles words. No. It’s not a sestina.

Houses drink from the flood, their walls swelling,

soft as clay that remembers the hands that shaped it.

Even the walls grow soft as if remembering their origin in the earth,

as if they want to return to the clay they were shaped from,

Roof beams tilt in prayer to the sky, the walls softened by silt,

whole houses drink until their bones sag,

Houses drink from the flood, their walls swelling,

We walk between houses that lean into silence,

But the flood leaves its taste behind, in the corners, in the cracks.

We live inside this thirst. The water knows every crack,

seeping into the bones of our homes,

turning them soft, pliant. The roof sags, the walls bend

whole houses drink until their bones sag,

So I've learnt how to spot AI's RS&Ts. Editors are asked to keep an eye open for repetitive metaphors a LLM is trying to rewrite.

Kindly see the mirrored metaphors about ‘house’ and the act of 'remembering,' in the poem below submitted by an unnamed contestant last year, that I’m still working on: I’m alleging Al has mirrored the same metaphor 3-4 different ways.

A

1. ‘[w]hole houses drink until their bones sag,’

2. ‘Houses drink from the flood, their walls swelling’

3. ‘We walk between houses that lean into silence

B

1. 'soft as clay that remembers the hands that shaped it'

2. 'We build where the soil remembers water'

3. 'Even the walls grow soft as if remembering their origin in the earth'

C

What’s happening with the houses’ bones?  The story the poem is telling is erratic:

1.      ‘whole houses drink until their bones sag’

2.      ‘seeping into the bones of our homes’

Check out the perfect rhyme and stresses in these lines:

'Roof beams tilt in prayer to the sky, the walls softened by silt'

I was told this line has a loosely iambic metre.

Roof beams tilt in prayer to the sky, the walls softened by silt

Pay attention to the stressed syllables marked as: (/**).

× / × / × / ×

Roof beams tilt [in prayer to the sky,]

(dah, dah, dah)

× / × / × / ×

the [walls softened by silt]

(dah, dah, dah)

In Lagos, the rain comes like a memory—

old as the riverbed, *filling the air with its song. (a)

Houses drink from the flood, their walls *swelling, (a)

soft as clay that remembers the hands that shaped it.

Each year, the flood sweeps in, not as a conqueror but as a visitor, (b/b)

like knees in prayer— a kind of surrender.

their ribs fragile, yet holding on— just like us, holding on. (c/c)

 Where did the poet — if he wrote this poem himself — learn this perfect stress pattern?  It’s almost as if a linguistic expert wrote this or most likely a machine did.

The poem seems to be a rip-off of some kind or pedology or soil science report. A deep-internet search matched part of the phrase: ‘we build where the soil remembers water’ to a research on grassland soil published in the Soil Science Society of America Journal. It contains the phrase ‘soil remembers.’ Please see below:

This citation contains the following words also found in the 'House of Water' poem:

• Soil remembers

• Memory

• land

Reference

The Soil Remembers

Soil Science Society of America Journal

• November 2016

• 80(6)

DOI:10.2136/sssaj2016.05.0143

Link to research article: The Soil Remembers 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309335735_The_Soil_Remembers

Links to a 2009 Back Country Blog Post by Hikers

Who Went to Bucksin Gulch After a 'recent flood'

For its part, the phrase, ‘softened by silt,' appears to have been found online in an article by Backcountry magazine.’ A deep-internet search matched part of the phrase to an article about river crossing. (Line 6 in the screengrab below)

https://backcountrypost.com/threads/buckskin-gulch-august-of-09.230/

'the water are softened by the silt in the water, you start on a soft sandbar stepping down onto a thin sheet of clay that acts like ice for a few feet then you step into 6-12 inches of overly wet clay that sucks your feet in, now step into the river this step and any other in the river ...'

Your boots are full of water and now you have to cross a river so full of muck that the (...) a thin sheet of clay that acts like ice for a few feet then you step into 6-12 inches of overly wet clay that sucks your feet in,

Both Sam and I agree this was one of the most difficult hikes we have done. from reading other peoples experiences our 10 hour trip through buckskin is not that uncommon but the recent flood caused us a lot more physical toil that was normal for the hike at the end of Buckskin and up the Paria.

These words and phrases from the cited blog, appear in the contestant's 'House of Water' poem:

• softened by [the] silt

• soft

• clay

• the river

• flood

COPYRIGHTED, used for evidential purposes only

Buckskin Gulch -- August of 09

https://backcountrypost.com/threads/buckskin-gulch-august-of-09.230/

AI-Hallucination/s

In lines 11 & 12, the poem puts forward false information:

11.  Even the walls grow soft as if remembering their origin in the earth,

12.  as if they want to return to the clay they were shaped from

Won't the poet - a recent university graduate - who their relative is still claiming wrote the piece - know the building material/s which the walls of most houses in Nigeria are made? A 2012 report in the International Journal of Sustainable Built Environment states that an estimated 90% of houses in Nigeria are built from concrete blocks. Other popular materials are cement, lime or bitumen.

Reference

International Journal of Sustainable Built Environment

Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2014, Pages 72-86

Disclaimer

I must add that the writer's sibling profusely denies using AI assistance to write this entry. The author's relative claims the poem was written in 2023, prior to the publication of the novel with the same name. I was threathened with a lawsuit if I didn't stop claiming the poem was not written by a human. The problem is the original queries were raised by random readers in the UK and on social media.

Extract from emailed response:

 Formal Response to Allegations and Request for Immediate Action-

You reinforced these claims, describing the poem as “over-polished,” pointing to its punctuation and and structure, and referencing input from what you described as a “team of Wikipedia-trained writers” as indicators of artificial generation. 

I found these assertions both alarming and deeply unsettling. I say this not only as his sibling, but as someone who was directly involved in the editorial process of that poem prior to its submission. I worked closely with him in refining the piece and can state, with full confidence, that the work was not generated using AI.

His development as a writer has been consistent and traceable over the years, and I have personally witnessed and contributed to that growth through sustained editorial guidance. These are not minor claims. Allegations of this nature directly impact a writer’s credibility, reputation, and future opportunities. They demand a level of care, verification, and discretion that has not been exercised in this case at all.

While I recognize that concerns about AI use in writing are both important and timely, this situation reflects a broader and troubling tendency toward premature conclusions, where stylistic features are mistaken for evidence, and suspicion is allowed to stand in for proof under the guise of identifying AI through so-called “human markers.”

Reliability of Scan

The same detection tools proved the 2025 overall winner's poem was entirely human. (See below) The poem employed much more complex words and phrases than other entries. The use of rare words matches the writing style of the winning poet.

Collaborative Evidence

Here's another write-up on SubStack by the same author who sent in 'The House of Water' poem. Can you spot the telltale signs of AI?

Music is one of the most powerful forms of expression known to humanity. It shapes emotions, influences beliefs, and often reflects the values of a society. In contemporary discourse, especially within religious and cultural spaces—the classification of music into gospel, secular, and carnal has generated intense debate. These terms are frequently used, yet rarely examined deeply.

This article offers a reflective, conversational, and persuasive exploration of these categories, not merely to label music but to understand the values, intentions, and impacts behind them.

Understanding Gospel Music

Gospel music is fundamentally purpose-driven. Its primary aim is to glorify God, communicate spiritual truths, and encourage faith, worship, and moral reflection. Unlike other forms of music, gospel music is not defined solely by sound, rhythm, or instrumentation but by message, intention, and spiritual orientation.

This write-up by the same poet was a copy-and-paste of a research conducted by Samford University. The poet shared it on their Substack page, without crediting the original authors/ sources.

COPYRIGHTED

Please read a real poem written by the same contestant, eerily similar to the classic poem: 'A Song for the Women of My Land' by Oumar Farouk Sesay.

This poem reminds me of my first song,  how I struggled to start it. 

I wrote a song about something that could never be—

a hymn born from the deep, dark soil of uncried years.

In the high notes, you will understand that it’s a song 

about something that never was:

a wild, luminous dream whispered in the wind of lost hope.

In the low notes, you will hear the loss the man had suffered—

the weight of ancient grief, like storm clouds gathering over a barren land.

I mumbled a few words of prayer in the chorus,

each syllable a tender incantation against oblivion,

And the melody stayed with me for years.

Words from a broken soul.

This poem is still the same as my first song,

How I struggled to complete it.

[These words and expressions also appear in Mr Farouk's poem, taught in West African schools: lost, song, soil, wind, years, quoted below]

'A Song for the Women of My Land'

Oumar Farouk Sesay

COPYRIGHTED

Like a sculptor chipping away at bits of wood,

Time chisels away bits of their memory

It strips away lyrics of the song of the women of my land

Leaving only a fading tune echoing the song,

they sang in the forlorn fields

about their lives; songs

of how they ploughed the terrain of their mindscape

for memories of lyrics lost in the vast void of time,

in those days when a song beheld their lives;

when servitude cuffed the ankles of their soul,

and dereliction decapitated the epic of their lives.

With a song, they sponged off their anguish,

to behold their collective pain,

to celebrate their gains,

give lyrics to the tune of their lives,

cheat the tyranny of time,

and commune with the yet unborn

to give meaning to an epoch lost in antiquity,

Yet time strips the lyrics and scars the tune,

leaving a dying song

Dead! Like the women who died long ago,

Leaving the song to tell the story of their lives

Today the tune roams the forlorn fields

Like their souls looking for lyrics

To tell the tale of the servitude

of the women of my land

Who ploughed their soil and soul

For a song to sing the story of their lives

The song of the women of my land

left in the memory of the wind.

Now feeding the verses of poets, it echoes in fields

Wriggling in rhythms and melodies,

Hollering in distant tunes

In places far afield

from the forlorn fields,

where the song of their lives died.

The stuttering lips of my pen

And the screeching voice of my nibtry

to sing the song of the women of my land

In verses far from the theatre of toil

where they left a song that now roams the land

stripped of lyrics like a scorned ghost.

The tune tuning the tenor of my verse,

is all that remains of the song of the women of my land

Who laboured and died leaving a dying song:

The dirge of their lives!

Example of a Chat GPT Poem submitted by another Nigerian contestant in 2025.

Roots in the Rain (AI sounding title)

{The following poem was submmitted by another contestant in the 2025 Annual Bridgette James Poetry Competition.}

How long did it take you to guess it was written by Chat GPT?

1. I walk where rivers bleed into the sky,

2. Port Harcourt’s heart beats beneath my feet.

3. The earth knows me deeper than my name. (Nonsensical imagery)

4. Barefoot, I feel the pulse of moss,

5. Cool and ancient, cradling each step.  (Attributing three qualities)

6. In the mangroves’ quiet hum,

7. I hear your name on the wind. (in)

8. Are you the shadow flitting through trees,

9. Or the steady flow of water over stone?

10. I search for you in swaying branches,

11. Each leaf a breath, each ripple your trace.  (Each this...each that)

12. You are not flesh, but spirit, (Negative parallelism)

13. Woven in the forest’s endless weave,

14. Alive in the rain that falls.

15. The Niger’s arms stretch wide,

16. Its waters carrying my dreams afar.

17. In silence, I call to you, (Nonsensical imagery)

18. And the river answers with laughter.

19. A hawk’s cry slices the clouds,

20. Sharp as the ache of your absence. (Sharp is a word LLMs overuse)

21. But you are here,

22. Not in things I can touch,

23. But in the rhythm of this land,

24. Slipping through my fingers like rain.

25. An oak stands tall,

26. Its roots tangled in the soil of my birth.

27. The rain falls, steady, unrelenting, (According to search engines, rain rarely just "falls" in AI poetry; it almost always "does something else.)

28. And in it, I find you again,

29. In the earth’s sigh, in birds taking flight at dawn.

30. I am not separate from this,

31. Not from rivers, trees, or rain,

32. Nor from laughter in Port Harcourt’s streets.

33. In each pulse, I hear you,

34. A rhythm in the veins of the earth,

35. A song in the wind’s rustle, woven into the rain, The earth and you. (Group of threes)

Proof of How Contestant Number 2, Normally Writes

A colour-coded Image shows words in 'House of Water', (sent in by contestant number one) are repeated in an erratic manner. No poet would make such mistakes.

Example2

Please see below a poem generated in 2026 by ChatGPT from the prompt:  

Write a free verse poem on the topic floods or heavy rain.

The sky breaks, a heavy, grey promise falling upon the swamp. [Two adjectives preceding noun]Lagos, city of twenty million,holds its breath, then surrenders.Water—not a river, but a sudden, angry sea,rising to meet the horizon in the middle of the expressway.

Plastic bottles, old slippers, and broken dreamsfloat in the brown, murky tide,sailing down the middle of the street. Yellow buses, danfos, transform into ships,engines coughing, struggling against the current that swallows the potholes whole.

The air is thick, metallic, smelling of wet earth and debris. In the narrow alleys of Ajegunle,in the modern quiet of Lekki,the water cares not for address.It creeps under doors,a silent, relentless guest,forcing children onto tabletops and lifting mattresses to float.

"No go area" becomes a promise kept. Work stops. The market is a sea of submerged wares,tomatoes floating alongside synthetic hair, traders lifting their hands to the sky, a silent ooh in the face of the rain.

Yet, the city does not break. Strangers join hands in the deluge,pushing a stuck car in the murky deep, laughter rising above the thunder, a collective survival, until the sun returns to bake the mud, and we wait, once more, for the sky to break again.

Chat GPT or Generative=AI tools like using these terms to describe floods. (See above & below)

• wet

• creeps

• the water

• breath

  
  

Where Did the House of Water Title Come From?

I can't say for certain, but the novel: The House of Water (2025) was being heavily advertised around the time my competition was running in April 2025.

It tells teenager Iona Griffri’s story. She returns home to her house in Wales where floods occur all the time.  She finds out that her home is flooded. The idea of building in a flood-prone area recurs in the poem: ‘The House of Water.’

Both works use the image of water to show how houses are submerged by it.  The author of ‘The House of Water’ poem couldn’t have known these similarities. I am alleging that an AI tool might do, though.  

House of Water

Another Chat GPT Poem

The walls were never meant to breathe, yet they inhale the salt-wet air, exhale the smell of rusted zinc and rain-swollen wood. In Lagos, the streets learn the language of rivers every rainy season— names of avenues dissolve into ripples, addresses drift like paper boats. A house stands here, its foundation a memory of dry ground, its windows blinking with the reflection of sky-water. Inside, the floor hums with the slow heartbeat of the flood, chairs wear skirts of silt, and the fridge leans like a tired sentinel against the tide. Children wade through the living room, their laughter skipping over the surface like stones that never sink. Outside, the lagoon stretches its fingers inland, claiming what was once borrowed. The house does not fight— it floats in its own way, a stubborn raft of brick and prayer. And when the rain stops, and the water pulls back into the mouth of the sea, it leaves behind a thin film of silver on the walls, as if the flood wanted to sign its name.

Telltale Signs

What are the Features of AI-generated Poetry?

1. AI-poems are over polished. You may see perfect stanza lengths and evidence of perfect writing skills.

2. Lines may have perfect symmetry

3. AI-poetry lacks nuance or subtle changes in tone and meaning A poem written by a machine doesn't give other perspectives. The concluding lines are quite generic and direct.

4. One can sometimes identify robotic transitions between sentences and stanzas.

5. An AI-generated poem is an over-structured piece: too many similes, adjectives, et cetera. Some lines are a rephrasing of previous lines. Metaphors may be off or strange.

6. No-one POV is brought to the forward. Where's the eccentric or homourous voice?

7. AI-poems lacks elements of creativity that may be present in human writing.

8. AI-poems do not vary their style.

9. Oversue of the comma. (See 'The House of Water')

A Word Salad

There are 26 commas in the House of Water poem. It is a widely observed phenomenon that AI-generated poetry, and AI text in general, often overuses commas, em dashes, and Oxford commas.

Word frequency

word	count
the	29
in	14
to	8
as	7
of	6
their	5
a	4
flood	4
like	4
walls	4
we	4
but	3
houses	3
if	3
its	3
on	3
soft	3
that	3
again	2
behind	2
bones	2
clay	2
drink	2
from	2
holding	2
into	2
it	2
Lagos	2
land	2
live	2
not	2
our	2
prayer	2
remembers	2
roof	2
shaped	2
soil	2
they	2
until	2
water	2

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