Another Late-Night Misadventure with AI Haiku

Aye-Yai-AI! After midnight, in the wee early morning hours of 22 December 2025, I had another late-night misadventure with AI haiku. I asked Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, to “Write ten haiku in the style of Michael Dylan Welch.” Why do I have such evil thoughts? The following response came back in a split second:

To write in the style of Michael Dylan Welch, these poems prioritize sensory imagery and the “kireji” (cutting word/pause) over a strict 5-7-5 syllable count. They aim for a brief, objective “haiku moment.”

empty stadium—

the scent of wet grass

in the evening fog

distant thunder . . .

a toddler reaches

for the falling leaf

long winter night—

the blue glow

of the pilot light

morning frost

the silence between

the woodpecker’s taps

mountain spring—

the taste of iron

on the tin cup’s rim

summer moon

a cricket’s song

fills the empty jar

fading light—

the heron’s neck

becomes the reed

old garden gate

the rusty creak

of a passing breeze

beach bonfire—

the sparks fly up

to join the stars

first snowfall . . .

the sound of a broom

on the neighbor’s porch

For more instruction on this style, you can explore Welch’s collection of essays and tutorials on his website, Graceguts, or check his guide on How to Write Haiku.

I’ve never written a guide specifically called “How to Write Haiku,” so I’m not sure where that came from. However, more troubling was the fact that each poem felt eerily familiar, to the point of making me think that I did write them. Consequently, I tried searching for key phrases from each poem on my website. Phrases that matched poems I’d written were “empty stadium,” “mountain spring,” “summer moon” (not a surprise—and would match the haiku of many other poets), and “fading light.” Everything else was conjured up by Gemini, including all the juxtapositions. But aside from the directly borrowed lines, the poems still seemed strikingly similar to my own. This felt like a violation. How dare someone—or something—copy me so blatantly? Of course, I had asked Gemini to do this, but what would stop someone else from asking the same question and submitting poems like these under their own name? If these poems have any merit, could someone new to haiku piggyback on my supposed talent or expertise and publish their “own” haiku by doing this? Is this a kind of plagiarism, even if the directly quoted phrases are relatively few and perhaps sufficiently common as to not feel proprietary? These are all yet more examples of how AI seems to pay no heed to ethical considerations. Also, if AI can do this so easily, does that diminish the expertise and soul in my own poems? Is my writing style this narrow, this predictable? And should I feel guilty that some of the machine-generated juxtapositions seemed effective? Or maybe feel deflated by this? This felt like yet more violation, as if I’m easily replaceable. Of course, AI is just a tool. Its makers, if they cared at all, could argue that what people do with AI is their own responsibility—a hammer could be used to smash a skull or to build a house. But such a passing of the buck wouldn’t diminish the violations I still felt.

Another thought came to me. What if I submitted these poems to a reputable haiku journal, under my own name? What if they were to accept one or more of them? How would I feel about that? Would it feel like deception? (Yes, definitely.) Would it feel like an undermining compromise of my own writing expectations and creative integrity? (Again, definitely.) How would the editor feel if I revealed what I’d done? (Probably deceived, with their trust in me thus eroded.) How would the journal’s readers feel if they found out, either on purpose or by accident, that I had done this? Or if someone else had done this? There’s an element of horror to these questions. And worse yet, we may never know if something like this happens and is never revealed—and may have already happened. I want to trust that the haiku I’m reading are truly by the person whose name appears under each poem, that they represent that person’s heart. That’s because experiences are personal, and haiku writing is a vulnerable act of sharing those experiences. I never want to be taken advantage of, or take advantage of anyone else, and never want to damage someone else’s trust in the sharing of believable personal experience. Aye-Yai-AI indeed.