GPT 4 · BBC · 2023 to 2024

471 NIGHTS OF NEWS, IN VERSE.

Every night for sixteen months a Cloud Function read the BBC news and asked GPT 4 for the most uplifting historical event in it. Then GPT 4 wrote a poem about that event. The credit ran out in August 2024. This is what it left behind

432 poems in 471 nights, from 21 Apr 2023 to 3 Aug 2024

Last poem 3 Aug 2024 Retired

Poems Per Month

One bar for each month, with the poems against the nights in that month. A short bar shows nights when the function failed. The best full month was May 2024 with 31 poems. The worst was June 2023 with 24

Poems by month

Apr 20238/10
May 202328/31
Jun 202324/30
Jul 202330/31
Aug 202328/31
Sep 202328/30
Oct 202328/31
Nov 202326/30
Dec 202330/31
Jan 202430/31
Feb 202427/29
Mar 202426/31
Apr 202427/30
May 202431/31
Jun 202427/30
Jul 202431/31
Aug 20243/3

The first and last months are part months, so they count only the nights from the first poem and to the last poem

What The News Was About

The 25 most common words in the news summaries that GPT 4 read. I made the words lower case, removed the punctuation and removed a list of common words such as "the", "says" and "BBC". On 11 nights GPT 4 found no uplifting event and said so. Those summaries are not in the counts

Top words in the news

global64
history53
world46
political46
industry45
president42
shift40
power39
step37
resilience37
marking36
towards35
conflict34
space33
international33
human31
understanding30
hope30
milestone29
providing28
demonstrating28
rights27
south27
people27
highlighting27

Themes By Month

The top three news words in each month. Read down the table to see how the story of the year moved

Top three words each month

MonthWord 1Word 2Word 3
Apr 2023spacexspacedespite
May 2023peopleglobaltogether
Jun 2023childrenspellingbee
Jul 2023worldindustryglobal
Aug 2023spacehistoryworld
Sep 2023worldukrainediplomatic
Oct 2023worldrecordcountrys
Nov 2023globaltowardshistory
Dec 2023conflictgazaproviding
Jan 2024justiceinternationalgaza
Feb 2024coinsglobalformer
Mar 2024industryhistoryshift
Apr 2024presidentunderstandinghistory
May 2024technologyshiftinternational
Jun 2024politicalpresidentgaza
Jul 2024politicalpresidentglobal
Aug 2024actbidenrussia

The Shape Of A Poem

How long the poems were and how often they rhymed. Select a date to read that poem. The rhyme rule is rough. A poem rhymes if the last words of its first two lines end in the same two letters. So it misses some rhymes and finds some false ones

Poem lengths and rhymes

Lines per poem 8.0 The average
Words per line 7.5 The average
Rhymes 57% Of poems rhyme their first two lines
Words per poem 60 The average
Longest poem 100 Words, on 3 Aug 2023
Shortest poem 37 Words, on 16 May 2023

Words The Poet Loved

The 20 most common words in the poems, next to the 20 most common words in the news. The same list of common words is removed from both

In the poems

tale354
history243
heart190
beacon177
hope137
testament128
grand128
land119
bright116
bold108
hearts102
light97
unfolds89
courage86
night78
time77
every75
brave71
old67
world67

In the news

global64
history53
world46
political46
industry45
president42
shift40
power39
step37
resilience37
marking36
towards35
conflict34
space33
international33
human31
understanding30
hope30
milestone29
providing28

Read One

Select a highlighted date on the calendar to read the poem for that night. Then show the news story that GPT 4 used to write it

Select a highlighted date
What

A new poem about an uplifting event in the BBC news appeared here each night from April 2023 to August 2024. There are 432 poems in the archive

How

Each night at 10 pm PST, a Google Cloud Scheduler job started and sent a message through PubSub to a Google Cloud Function. A Cloud Function is a program that runs on machines in "the cloud". The Cloud Function got the BBC news and asked GPT 4 for the most uplifting historical event in it, in a few sentences. Then it asked GPT 4 to write a short poem about that event. Last, it saved the poem to my database, and the poem appeared here

Why

It was a fun way to learn how to use cloud infrastructure to run jobs on a schedule. It was also interesting to read the news as poetry, which can make it feel more positive

Why it stopped

The Cloud Function paid for GPT 4 with OpenAI credit. In August 2024 the credit ran out, so the poems stopped. I retired the nightly job. This page is now an archive of what it captured