A PHD student at the University of Glasgow is celebrating Burns Night by releasing a machine generated poetry pamphlet in style of our national bard - Robert Burns. 

The artificial intelligence project titled 'Robot Burns' will include 20 pieces of work across a variety of subjects and is accompanied by illustrations from Hoolet's co-founder, Alasdair Currie. 

Creator of Robot Burns, Perry Gibson is seeking to explore if his project can replicate the elegance, insight and wit of Scotland's national bard. 

Ahead of his release, Mr Perry said: "I'm excited to hear what people think of the results and how they feel Robot Burns compares to the work of Scotland's national bard, Robert Burns."

"It's a thought-provoking contribution to the debate surrounding the merits of Artificial Intelligence. Am I seen as an author or a coder? I guess our readers will let me know."

Mr Perry started the project last January, but after the first attempt didn't go as planned and undergraduate commitments loomed, the project was put aside until just a couple of weeks ago. The project was compiled from a dataset of Burns poems, where Perry had to train an LSTM model from scratch. 

Mr Perry added: "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. But when I read the first output from my small test model, I was a bit taken aback."

"I don’t know what “stragmas” are, but it is a good word. The stanza gave me the type feelings I get when I read poetry. That’s when I started thinking about this from a non-technical perspective."

"This will do nothing to change Burns’ existing body of work, and it has actually brought at least one reader back to him (namely, me)."

"At the risk of anthropomorphising, I don’t think what Robot Burns is doing is much different from what so many young writers have done before, and will continue to do: learn from the best, and then take it somewhere new."

All proceeds from the sale of the publication will be donated to The Samaritans and their work to prevent suicide, a subject close to Perry’s heart following the loss of his friend, Chris, on January 25, 2016.