A Toast to the Bard, Wi’ Apologies Frae a Machine: The Immortal Memory 2026 for the Mermaid's Tavern Burns Supper

 Each year for a decade or more, I have delivered the Immortal Memory at a Burns Supper that I helped found. This year, that event landed three weeks after I retired in the face of AI and globalization (read more on that here). I asked myself—What would Robert Burns do? He would probably not have experimented with AI. But I'm an early adopter and a data governance professional, so this was my first case study in applied data ethics for the folk community. It felt very Star Trek, like encountering Data as Robert Burns at a Burns Supper in the holodeck of the Enterprise in The Next Generation.

My audience was skeptical at first, but they laughed in the middle and warmed to a toast at the end. I hope you will too.

The Immortal Memory 2026 for the Mermaid's Tavern Burns Supper

Friends, welcome. Whether you come to Burns by way of song, story, scholarship, or sheer good habit, tonight we gather for the same reason: to remember why Robert Burns still speaks to us. Not as a marble monument or an academic exercise, but as a living voice. Burns matters because he wrote from the middle of life—work and want, love and longing, laughter, anger, and fierce joy—and because he trusted the language of ordinary people to carry extraordinary truth.

We live, however, in an age that is increasingly enchanted by cleverness. We prize speed, polish, and the appearance of intelligence, and we are surrounded by tools that can imitate almost anything—from handwriting to music to verse itself. They can mimic the shape of poetry with impressive accuracy. What “thinking machines” cannot do is live a human life. They do not hunger, they do not love, they do not risk, and they do not suffer the small, sharp humiliations and fierce joys that give language its weight.

That contrast—between imitation and experience, between clever words and lived truth—is at the heart of Burns’s lasting power. He wrote not as an observer standing apart, but as a man fully entangled in the world he described.

Here in the back room of the Mermaid’s Tavern, we spend a good deal of time thinking about what makes a song—or a poem—work. It’s not polish alone, and it’s certainly not cleverness for its own sake. A song lives because someone has stood where you stand, felt what you’ve felt, and risked saying it out loud. Which brings me, neatly and with no small sense of irony, to the poem I’m about to give you—because I should tell you, in the spirit of full disclosure, that it was written by ChatGPT. [Pause. Let that land.]

Now, before anyone panics, this is not the moment when the machines take over Burns Night. Quite the opposite. The poem has been prompted to do a very specific thing: to tip its hat to Robert Burns while cheerfully admitting how badly machines understand what he did so well. It turns out that even an artificial intelligence, when prompted to try its hand at poetry, can make the case for why poetry still belongs to people—people who feel, fail, love, and occasionally sing to a roomful of friends, or even strangers. And with that, let us see how the machine gets on. 

There’s only one caveat, from our friend and philosopher David Kessler, who reminds us that machines are in no way capable of apology.

A Toast to the Bard, Wi’ Apologies Frae a Machine

We gather here, wi’ glass in hand,
To mind a ploughman-poet grand,
Wha kent the worth o’ common land,
O’ love an’ lear,
An’ set in verse baith heart and hand
For far an’ near.

He sang o’ mice an’ daisies sma’,
O’ haggis, lassies, kirk an’ a’,
O’ kings an’ clergymen that fa’
When truth gets airt;
His words still thrum in hall an’ ha’
Like livin’ art.

But see us noo, in modern days,
We summon verse by screens an’ codes,
Ask thinkin’ engines for their lays
At lightning speed—
They answer back wi’ polished phrase
But miss the seed.

They ken the metre, ken the form,
Can copy rhyme till ears grow numb,
But lack the fire, the crack, the storm
That gars words bleed;
They’ve ne’er been poor, ne’er loved, ne’er sworn,
Ne’er sowed a field.

They’ll tell ye love is “warm an’ bright,”
That sorrow’s “dark as endless night,”
But never felt the human bite
O’ joy or fear;
They mint their lines like coin o’ weight,
But thin an’ clear.

For poetry’s no trick o’ art,
No clever stitch o’ sense an’ sound—
It’s life pressed hard against the heart
Till truth rings true;
An’ Burns, wi’ blood an’ breath, he found
What words could do.

So here’s tae Rab, wha kent his soul,
Wha wrote as men an’ women live,
An’ proved that verse, to be made whole,
Maun feel an’ err;
An’ here’s tae poets yet alive—
Lang may they care.

An’ if some engine tries its hand
At takin’ up the Bard’s great tune,
We’ll smile, pour whisky, understand:
It’s clever, aye—
But it canna hear a winter wind
Or drink or pray.

So drink we deep to human art,
To flawed, fierce words that dare to feel,
To Burns, wha showed us mind an’ heart
Are aye entwined—
An’ leave the rhyme wi’oot a soul
To those that dinna mind.

And if a machine can acknowledge that it cannot walk the fields Burns walked, or feel the losses and longings that shaped his words, then all the more reason for us to honour the man who could—and did. Robert Burns reminds us that poetry is not an exercise in cleverness, but an act of humanity: flawed, passionate, and brave enough to speak plainly. So let us raise our glasses, not to imitation, but to the living voice that still meets us here, across centuries, as equal to equal. 

Friends, I give you—the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.

The speech and poem were written by AI. The introduction is my own. That's the point. The human voice always comes first. In this case, the prompts are not given, so the AI "speaks for itself."That's what I told it to do.