
Bot Writes New Harry Potter Book - bespoke_engnr
http://botnik.org/content/harry-potter.html
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andolanra
This sounds like a nitpick but I feel very strongly about this: this is not
"written by a bot", it is written by a human (actually, several humans)
_assisted by_ a bot. In particular, it was written by human beings using
constrained predictive text keyboards that were trained on a Harry Potter
corpus. As a general rule of thumb, even in 2017, if you're reading "bot-
created" text that feels nonsensical but grammatical, it's either highly-
constrained in its generation process (e.g. using templates), human-curated,
or human-directed.

Here's the actual announcement from Botnik, which clearly uses the phrase
"predictive keyboards":
[https://twitter.com/botnikstudios/status/940627812259696643](https://twitter.com/botnikstudios/status/940627812259696643)
You can actually experiment with the exact process used! The predictive text
keyboards they created are available online: one for narration and one for
dialogue.

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

dialogue:
[http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=4210c86ded39e6380ad0e1...](http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=4210c86ded39e6380ad0e17cecd767f6)

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bespoke_engnr
Not a nitpick at all; thanks! I was wondering why the grammar was WAY better
than I was expecting, and how they got it to keep track of the 'state' of a
subject that had just been mentioned.

If things had improved that much in NLP-land since I last played around with
it, I would jump careers right now :-D.

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zaken
As funny as this is, I'm actually really looking forward to the day I can
generate an entire, unique fantasy epic on par with the best human authors of
today with the push of a button.

AI-generated entertainment in general is going to be awesome.

~~~
madez
Dwarf Fortress is a try at that, sort of.

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skookumchuck
It reads like "Bored of the Rings", but without the sly humor.

~~~
grawprog
Reminds me of this: [https://www.amazon.ca/Barry-Trotter-Shameless-Parody-
Gollanc...](https://www.amazon.ca/Barry-Trotter-Shameless-Parody-
Gollancz/dp/057507454X)

They were really bad. Worse than bored of the rings. I enjoyed bored of the
rings I didn't enjoy those.

