Last weekend when I took Elizabeth to highland dance I decided to cycle her in Hoss, our cargo bike, because the bike path was looking icy and I thought it would be safer. Big mistake. The bike path near our house wasn’t too bad but the further we got from the city centre the icier it became.
At one bridge, the faster I peddled the more I slid backwards. We had to walk over it by gripping the side railings and I somehow just managed to drag the bike with me.
As I neared our destination I decided there was no way I would be cycling home on the bike path, instead thinking I’d take the bike up to the road and cycle with traffic. This wouldn’t be fun but preferable to the ice rink on Deeside Way.
However, it was impossible to get the bike up to the road. There was a slight incline with nothing to grasp on to. We could barely walk up let alone push a bike.
I was forced to abandon poor Hoss on the bike path and he spent the night alone on Deeside Way, separated from his bike buddies in our shed. The next day Ben drove me back and amazingly all the ice had melted. There was barely a trace of it and I cycled home without any problems.
We had an ant death this week. One of the worker ants was either really dumb or committed suicide by drowning in a blob of honey. How could it do something so silly? It was the tiniest blob of honey but we’ve now taken to spreading it out in a line to avoid another fatality.
I asked ChatGPT, the AI taking the internet by storm, to write a poem for our fallen ant in the style of Robert Burns since it was Burns night in Scotland this week.
In the gloamin’, rich an’ yella,
An ant did meet his end,
In honey’s depths, sae deep an’ fella,
He couldnae fend.He struggled, an’ he fought it,
But the honey, it was strang,
An’ sae he sank doon deeper,
An’ knew his life was gane.Oh, the honey looked sae sweet,
But ’twas his endin’,
An’ aa he wanted was a taste,
But ’twas a deadly winnin’.Sae let this be a lesson,
That sometimes whit we seek,
Can lead tae oor destruction,
An’ mak oor hert grow weak.But though the ant was sma’,
His passin’, we’ll remember,
A cautionary tale, tae aa,
Of the dangers o’ sweet honey.
rachel.blog 
RIP ant but I love your poem
Thanks!
Jeepers – scary that ChatGBT can write a poem like that! It’s horribly good. I’ve heard that schools and universities are beginning to consider the need to go back to doing exams and assignments by hand again because of this.
I fear that upper schools and uni students are bright enough to just copy what the bot composes.
Yes, I agree. It’s as nightmare for teachers. I guess parents sometimes helped with assignments before but this is really taking it to the next level.
I was a software developer for nearly forty something years. One thing I learned in my career is that progress brings new ways of doing things, but also makes skills obsolete. It occurs to me that manual composition may now be an obsolete skill. The higher skill maybe the ability to guide bots into composing the right paper.