We vibe-coded a custom AI poetry lab. Here’s how you can, too.

Researchers are using artificial-intelligence tools to build their own platforms for teaching. Credit: wichan sumalee / Last November, our poetry students walked into the computer laboratory and found something new: a web interface with chat-room windows labelled “the structured studio” and “the exploratory atelier”. Each chat room ran the same artificial-intelligence chatbot that students could use to co-write poems in English, but the chatbot behaved differently between the two. In one case, the chatbot took creative risks, pushing students towards surprising metaphors; in the other, it was cautious and literal. Behind the chat-room windows was a custom AI platform that none of us — a language teacher, an English-literature PhD candidate and a literature professor all at Hong Kong Baptist University — could have built by ourselves. Our project began with a simple question: how can teachers use AI to help learners write poetry in English? We wanted to explore how different AI configurations shape creativity when students co-write poems with chatbots. We could have pointed our participants towards OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but generic chatbots don’t offer control over key parameters that drive AI behaviour, systematic conversation logging and ways to set up experimental conditions. We needed a custom platform — and none of us had the coding experience to build one. So, we turned to ‘vibe coding’. …