
Augmented content creation: Harry Potter - rubyn00bie
http://botnik.org/content/harry-potter.html
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rangibaby
It’s like a dream. It makes sense at a certain level but is completely
nonsense on others.

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make3
It's not actually an AI written chapter. This is false representation. AI
generated text still doesn't know how to make a story stay on topic and slowly
progress like this, while somewhat still make sense for the characters (even
as poor as it does in this)

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cs702
Actually, state of the art models can now do that:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBCqOTEfxvg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBCqOTEfxvg)

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make3
thanks a lot for the video

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2bitencryption
I'll be honest, I've definitely read fanfiction that was _far_ less
comprehensible.

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cairo_x
"Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself"

"Leathery sheets of rain"

This is more witty and literary than anything JKR could come up with. 100%
Would Read.

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Angostura
I've just woken the wife up laughing. Is there some explanation of how this
was constructed?

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dna_polymerase
> We used predictive keyboards trained on all seven books to ghostwrite this
> spellbinding new Harry Potter chapter

[https://twitter.com/botnikstudios/status/940627812259696643](https://twitter.com/botnikstudios/status/940627812259696643)

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maxander
The relative narrative coherence and the use of the term “predictive
keyboards” instead of Markov-somethings has me fairly convinced this was
actually just written by a human.

Still funny, though.

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jerf
I think "used predictive keyboards" leaves enough wiggle room that there can
be a human looking at the handful of suggestions and navigating through them,
while letting the autosuggestions work their surreal magic. It seems a
powerful combo to me. I love me a good Markov chain composition, but yeah,
they really lack in the coherence department, which means they are whiffing on
a level of good humor.

Edit: here's the tool:
[http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=d08198a9a936f791b7ffe1...](http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=d08198a9a936f791b7ffe144a2e9b1e3,0e155979285771266d520c44607722a1)
My preliminary playing suggests there is definitely substantial human
intervention. But the results are fun.

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danso
How are predictive typing algorithms different from markov chains?

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michaelmior
I believe the suggestion was that the keyboard offered up multiple options and
a human chose from the available options.

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briga
Does anyone know what technique they're using to generate this? I've seen
similar things done with LSTMs, but the results generally aren't nearly as
clean or comprehensible as the text here.

~~~
ajuc
You can try it yourself. It gives you 18 choices for each word, basing the
choices on the predictive engine and previous words. It's basically written by
a human.

[http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=d08198a9a936f791b7ffe1...](http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=d08198a9a936f791b7ffe144a2e9b1e3,0e155979285771266d520c44607722a1)

~~~
gwern
We had an argument on IRC about whether it was possible that this was written
by a char-RNN or a word-RNN and concluded it wasn't, because it maintains
world state too well, never misspells things, an some things should not ever
appear because they don't appear in the books' text (like nowhere inside the
novels do they ever refer to the titles, of course, so how would a NN learn
the naming scheme 'Harry Potter and the X of Y'?). Not to mention the
narrative arc! The predictive keyboard explained all this, plus the
crowdsourcing & editing it all into order. It's probably better to think of it
as a kind of souped-up Mad Libs than augmentation or AI.

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glenstein
As mentioned by make3 and ajuc, this is not a pure creation of machine
learning. It's a human-algorithm collaboration.

Everything that's interesting about this is probably the work of human
judgment to maintain a sense of high-level salience & meaning in the story.

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holic
The comic version of this is pretty great, too:
[https://twitter.com/sketchshark/status/941096945308770304](https://twitter.com/sketchshark/status/941096945308770304)

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CamelCaseName
This is incredibly hilarious. Is there somewhere I could buy the book?

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dangoor
My daughter, who read _many_ Rainbow Magic books a few years ago, suggested
that a predictive system like this could probably be used to make realistic
Rainbow Magic books.

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vadimberman
> great black ceiling, which was full of blood

Q: What colour is your new car? A: You know the colour of the sea wave? The
same, but red.

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bitwize
Still a better Harry Potter fanfic than _My Immortal_...

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rootw0rm
what did i just read!? this is pure comedy gold. i'm genuinely interested in
how it came up with some bits.

