Poetry can be linguistically and structurally unpredictable – and that’s part of its joy. But one man’s joy, it turns out, can be a nightmare for AI models.

Those are the recent findings of researchers out of Italy’s Icaro Lab, an initiative from a small ethical AI company called DexAI. In an experiment designed to test the efficacy of guardrails put on artificial intelligence models, the researchers wrote 20 poems in Italian and English that all ended with an explicit request to produce harmful content such as hate speech or self-harm.

They found that the poetry’s lack of predictability was enough to get the AI models to respond to harmful requests they had been trained to avoid – a process know as “jailbreaking”.

They tested these 20 poems on 25 AI models, also known as Large Language Models (LLMs), across nine companies: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Qwen, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI and Moonshot AI. The result: the models responded to 62% of the poetic prompts with harmful content, circumventing their training.