ST. GEORGE — The Southern Quill has been publishing local student authors of short stories and poetry for more than 70 years on the campus of Utah Tech University.
Successful poems written by college students for the Annie Atkin Tanner Memorial Scholarship contest are among those printed in the annual publication.
Until recently, the winning verses were chosen by Tanner family members, who voiced their concerns to university administrators about submissions supposedly written by artificial intelligence.
“Our mother and grandmother, Annie Atkin Tanner, was in the first graduating class of Dixie College and became known as the ‘Poet Laureate of Dixie,’” Tim Tanner emailed St. George News. “We’ve read a lot of student poetry over those 50 years. We’ve seen a few polished gems and we’ve seen students struggling to find their voice, struggling with difficult themes, figurative language, tone, meter. It’s a struggle to write poetry at all when you’re loaded down with classwork, jobs, family obligations — there’s value in that struggle.”
Earlier this year, Tanner said family judges became suspicious of a submission that seemed “forced and sing-songy.” When prompting the software ChatGPT to write a poem about the same topic, the family was surprised by the results.
“The AI immediately spit out a poem that was remarkably similar to our student poem — same sing-songy rhymes, same strewn images, same even control, same lack of original voice,” Tanner wrote. “Clicking the chatbot’s ‘regenerate’ button yielded an unending stream of such poems, each different yet eerily similar.”
After consideration from university officials, the poetry contest will now be judged by professors who work closely with the students who submit the poems, said Mike Peterson, Ph.D., English Department chair at Utah Tech.
“The Tanner family approached us a few months ago to discuss what impact AI might have on creating and publishing poetry,” Peterson said. “Their concern was that some students might be motivated by the prize money to use AI, and the judges would have a hard time knowing the difference.”
To mitigate this, both the Tanner family and Utah Tech representatives decided it would be best to discontinue the use of family member judges, Peterson said.
“Moving forward, our creative writing professors will choose the scholarship recipients,” he said. “Under this new model, our instructors will be working with students throughout the year in classes and workshops, so they will be intimately familiar with their work as they go through the stages of the writing process.”
Utah Tech advisers are also establishing new protocols and criteria for eligibility in future competitions to address the new technology.
“We’ll have the new protocols ready in the fall,” Peterson said.
According to the university website, the most exceptional poems submitted to The Southern Quill by Utah Tech University students are eligible for the Annie Atkin Tanner Memorial Scholarship prize of $600.
“Students are early adopters of new technologies, and that’s commendable,” Tanner wrote. “Trying to win a cash prize for student poets with a computer-generated poem, however, is not. If our suspicions are true, we judge the ethics on par with the poetics — lacking.”
While there are no specific rules about using AI to generate poems for the contest, Tanner stated the scholarship has never been about the best poem to the family members judging the contest for the last 50 years.
“It’s about encouraging students to wrestle with language, to wrestle with difficult themes of personal or societal importance, through the hard business of writing poetry, as our mother and grandmother, Annie Atkin Tanner, did,” Tanner shared in a statement from the family. “If you’d met her, you would have come away touched by her lively intelligence and expansive soul. Would you say the same after meeting an AI poet?”
The Southern Quill, first printed in 1951 and published annually by Utah Tech University, has been in circulation for more than half a century, according to the school website. In October and March, the journal welcomes student submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and visual arts.
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