Iain Strachan

 Introduction In this exercise with my ongoing experimentation with the AI program chatGPT, I took one of my short poems "Hoovering up the violets on the lawn", and got it to do an analysis of the poem.  I then asked it to rewrite the poem from the point of view of various characters in the poem.  I then attempted my own rewrites.  Since when you write anything poetic you are influenced by other writing you have seen, it is arguable that my rewrites were influenced by chatGPT's attempts, and that therefore it could be a tool to spark creativity.  First, here is the original poem, my own work, motivated by a real event, followed by chatGPT's analysis of it.  The title "Hoovering up the violets on the lawn" came to me while mowing the lawn and noticing how the rotary mower seems to resemble a hoover, sucking stuff up. Hoovering up the violets on the lawn There they were, unobtrusive yet elegant  Mingled with the straggly grass and tatty daisies. A shame to h

 I have been playing recently with the AI program "chatGPT" which has been causing quite a stir recently.  Initially I tried fairly silly questions to trip it up, and attempts to get it to write poetry (it can't!). But then I hit on the idea of getting it to rewrite an serious article about a minor academic discovery I made in 1996, in the style of a tabloid newspaper, such as the Daily Mail, and to suggest a headline for it. The details of the story are below in the text of the AI-generated article and the question I submitted to chatGPT.   chatGPT's "Daily Mail" style article about Shostakovich: SHOCK DISCOVERY: Data Scientist Uncovers Shostakovich's Cryptic Musical Message Beyond the Grave!  Iain Strachan, a data scientist with a love for mathematics and music, has made a startling discovery about the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. While studying for his PhD in machine learning, Strachan uncovered a hidden pattern in Shostakovich'