What is it about?
Many people today struggle with stress, anxiety, and emotional challenges. Classical Chinese poetry has been expressing and soothing human emotions for thousands of years, but modern readers often find it difficult to understand and connect with these ancient texts. We created Poemithy, an AI-powered app that transforms classical Chinese poetry into an accessible, interactive healing experience. The system guides users through three stages: first, it recommends poems that match their emotional state and presents them with beautiful ink-painting visuals, videos, and audio recitations; second, it helps users create their own poems by translating their feelings into poetic imagery; finally, it guides users through a recitation ceremony with a personalized encouragement letter from a "virtual historical poet." Our pilot study with 60 participants showed that users found the system easy to use, emotionally supportive, and culturally enriching.
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Photo by Song Chen on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Depression affects 95 million people in China, yet culturally-adapted digital mental health tools remain scarce. While poetry therapy is well-established in Western contexts, classical Chinese poetry's therapeutic potential has been largely untapped due to comprehension barriers and lack of guided interaction. Poemithy is the first system to systematically integrate established poetry therapy frameworks with classical Chinese poetry, powered by multimodal AI. By combining emotion-aware poem recommendation, guided creative writing, and immersive multimedia presentation, we lower the barriers that prevent ordinary people from engaging with their own literary heritage for emotional well-being. This work opens new possibilities for using AI to bridge ancient cultural wisdom with modern mental health needs—not just for Chinese users, but potentially for other literary traditions worldwide.
Perspectives
Working on Poemithy has been deeply meaningful to me. As a doctoral student researching digital humanities and digital publishing, I believe technology should not only preserve cultural heritage but also make it genuinely useful for people's lives today. Seeing participants in our study create their own poems and describe feeling "understood" by ancient poets was incredibly rewarding. I hope this work inspires others to explore how AI can serve as a bridge between tradition and modern well-being, making cultural treasures not textbook pieces, but living resources for healing.
Yangming Zhang
Wuhan University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Poemithy: Leveraging Multimodal LLMs for Emotional Healing through Classical Chinese Poetry, October 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3714394.3754361.
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