Augmented content creation: Harry Potter

thanks a lot for the video

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.

So basically extracted noun phrases and concatenated where the grammar fits?

I think I've seen it before somewhere.

It's perhaps less interesting as technology than pure machine-generated text, but I find it fascinating creatively. In practice it's a collaboration where the machine provides absurdity, and the human writer shapes it into a form that humans can easily read and enjoy. Traditional machine-generated text often has too many sharp edges to work as surrealist humor.

"Harry asked professor mcgonagall for his glasses and she threw owl treats up his trousers." Well, that was fun.

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.