Botnik Studios
Type of site
Entertainment website
URLwww.botnik.org
Launched2016 (2016)[1]

Botnik Studios is an entertainment group developed to exhibit work created by the Botnik community, a writer's society of artists and developers who incorporate technology in the creation of comedy.[2] This content is published on the Botnik homepage.[3]

Features

Botnik's main tool is a predictive text keyboard, similar to one used by a smartphone. It offers options of words to type based on what has been previously entered, meaning that if the tool has analyzed a body of text it will find combinations of words likely to be used by a particular author[4] whose text has been 'scraped' by the system.[5]

The result generally sounds almost authentic in that it is recognizable but ridiculous enough to be considered funny by readers.[6]

History

The program was developed by Jamie Brew, a former ClickHole and The Onion writer, and Bob Mankoff, who is humor editor at Esquire and former cartoon editor of The New Yorker.[7][8][9] In August 2017 they were joined by computational scientist Elle O'Brien[10] and creative developer Joseph Parker.[11] Brew and O'Brien are based in Seattle and Mankoff and Parker work in New York.[12]

In 2017 Botnik began referring to themselves as an open community,[13] meaning Botnik users can download the predictive keypad, experiment with the tool and display their outcomes on the community page of the Botnik website.[14] In July of that year they received a grant from the Amazon/Techstars Accelerator Program thanks to being a startup whose technology could realistically improve Amazon's smart speaker assistant, Alexa.[15]

Botnik became better known when Zach Braff, the actor who plays J.D. on the medical comedy series Scrubs, shared a recording of himself reading a Scrubs-style monologue written by the Botnik system in December 2017.[16]

Botnik's Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash was ranked number four in the list of ten best internet moments in 2017 by The Guardian.[17]

References

  1. ↑ Elio, Anthony. "An Inside Look at Botnik Studios’ Absurd AI" Innovation & Tech Today (February 8, 2019)
  2. ↑ Flood, Alison (13 December 2017). "'He began to eat Hermione's family': bot tries to write Harry Potter book – and fails in magic ways". the Guardian. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  3. ↑ "Botnik Augmented Content". Botnik. Archived from the original on 25 January 2018. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  4. ↑ "Botnik Studios". botnik.org. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  5. ↑ The Cracked Podcast (22 January 2018). "How Predictive Text Gave Us A New Harry Potter Chapter" (Podcast). Cracked. Event occurs at 21:38. Retrieved 22 January 2018. the mass crowd driven thing came in the last year. We modelled it after comedy writers groups
  6. ↑ "Truly creative A.I. is just around the corner. Here's why that's a big deal". Digital Trends. 5 January 2018. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  7. ↑ Schuessler, Jennifer (7 March 2017). "A Cartoonist Savors His Favorite Art for The New Yorker". The New York Times. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  8. ↑ Elio, Anthony. "An Inside Look at Botnik Studios’ Absurd AI" Innovation & Tech Today (February 8, 2019)
  9. ↑ Raftery, Brian. "The Surreal Comedy Bot That's Turning AI Into LOL" Wired (October 23, 2017)
  10. ↑ "Elle O'brien on Linkedin". Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  11. ↑ Berman, Robby. "A Bot Wrote a New Harry Potter Chapter, and It Is Utterly Crazy". Big Think. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  12. ↑ "Wherrelz : Startup Spotlight: Can a machine learn to laugh Botnik crosses a comedian with AI to find out : curated startup news". wherrelz.com. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  13. ↑ The Cracked Podcast (22 January 2018). "How Predictive Text Gave Us A New Harry Potter Chapter" (Podcast). Cracked. Event occurs at 17:10. Retrieved 22 January 2018. the mass crowd driven thing came in the last year. We modelled it after comedy writers groups
  14. ↑ "Startup Spotlight: Can a machine learn to laugh? Botnik crosses a comedian with AI to find out". GeekWire. 26 October 2017. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  15. ↑ "A Former Clickhole Writer Made a 'Content Bot' That Will Probably Become My Boss". Motherboard. 12 October 2017. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  16. ↑ "Zach Braff reprises his 'Scrubs' character to read a script written by an A.I." Digital Trends. 19 December 2017. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  17. ↑ Wong, Julia Carrie (29 December 2017). "Ten genuinely great things the internet gave us in 2017, featuring baby hippos". the Guardian. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
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