'Robot Burns' poems created by artificial intelligence

They are some of the most well-known and loved poems in the world whose insightful sentiments have withstood the test of time over hundreds of years. But now a student at the University of Glasgow has used a "Robot Burns" artificial intelligence (AI) poem generator programme to create almost "instant works" by Robert Burns, in honour of a fellow student, Chris, who took his own life on Burns Day, on 25 January 2016. Perry Gibson, who is studying for a PhD in computing science, is donating all proceeds of his limited edition Robot Burns pamphlet to The Samaritans, the suicide prevention charity. The Robot Burns pamphlet includes 20 works across a variety of subjects and is accompanied by illustrations by Alasdair Currie, co-founder of independent Scottish publisher Hooltet Publishing. Mr Gibson gathered a data set of 2,000 poems by Burns, used an algorithm and created a specific coding programme which were then analysed by the GPT-2 programme operated by OpenAI whose funders include technology entrepreneur Elon Musk."When the first Burns'poem' came out, I blinked. I hadn't thought of what the consequences would be. "When I started, I just wanted to learn more about the technology, I hadn't really thought too much about what the text was going to be.