Bot Writes New Harry Potter Book

Re:Bot Writes New Harry Potter Book by andolanra on Friday December 15, 2017 @06:38PM (#15936254)

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 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...

dialogue: http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=4210c86ded39e6380ad0e1...

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Re:Bot Writes New Harry Potter Book by bespoke_engnr on Saturday December 16, 2017 @04:08AM (#15938599)

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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