Botnik Studios
 | |
Website type | Entertainment website |
|---|---|
| Website | www |
| Launched | 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
[edit]Botnik's main tool is a predictive text keyboard, similar to one used by a smartphone.[4] The program, called Voicebox, offers several choices of words to type based on what the program predicts is likely to follow words that have already been entered.[5] Users can upload their own training data or select from a list of preloaded training data provided by Botnik,[5] including pancake recipes, the Communist Manifesto, and the narration from all seven Harry Potter novels.[6] The resulting text created by users has an uncanny quality that many readers find amusing.[7]
History
[edit]In 2016, Jamie Brew, a former writer for The Onion and then head writer at ClickHole, developed a predictive text keyboard inspired by the iPhone's predictive keyboard.[8] He was soon introduced to Bob Mankoff, a humor editor at Esquire and former cartoon editor of The New Yorker, by Mankoff's assistant at The New Yorker.[9] Brew and Mankoff formed the company in October 2016,[10] and were later joined by lead scientist Elle O'Brien in August 2017.[11] Brew and O'Brien are based in Seattle, Washington, and Mankoff works in New York with creative director Joseph Parker.[12]
In July 2017, Botnik 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.[13][14] In 2018, Botnik began referring to themselves as an open community,[15] meaning users can download the predictive keypad, experiment with the tool, and share their outcomes on the community page of the Botnik website.[12]
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
[edit]- ↑ Elio, Anthony. "An Inside Look at Botnik Studios’ Absurd AI" Innovation & Tech Today (8 February 2019)
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ "Augmented Comedy Creation". Botnik Studios. Archived from the original on 25 January 2018. Retrieved 12 August 2026.
- ↑ Raftery, Brian (23 October 2017). "The Surreal Comedy Bot That's Turning AI Into LOL". Wired. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
- 1 2 Lee, Demi (31 May 2018). "How to use predictive text keyboards for AI-generated comedy". The Verge. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
- ↑ "Are AI fairytales the future?". BBC News. 18 April 2018. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
- ↑ Dormehl, Luke (5 January 2018). "Truly creative A.I. is just around the corner. Here's why that's a big deal". Digital Trends. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
- ↑ Purdom, Clayton (25 May 2018). "Comedians are outsourcing their jokes to AI". Bloomberg.com.
- ↑ McBain, Sophie (2017). "The rise of creative computers". New Statesman. Vol. 146, no. 5395. p. 17.
- ↑ Tobias, Scott (5 April 2018). "Can algorithms be funny? Veterans of Clickhole and the New Yorker team up to find out". The Washington Post. Retrieved 12 August 2026.
- ↑ MacLaughlin, Nina (13 May 2018). "Pop-Up Magazine returns to Boston". The Boston Globe. p. N16. Retrieved 11 August 2026 – via Newspapers.com.
- 1 2 Stiffler, Lisa (26 October 2017). "Startup Spotlight: Can a machine learn to laugh? Botnik crosses a comedian with AI to find out". GeekWire. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
- ↑ "A Former Clickhole Writer Made a 'Content Bot' That Will Probably Become My Boss". Motherboard. 12 October 2017. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
- ↑ Schuessler, Jennifer (7 March 2017). "A Cartoonist Savors His Favorite Art for The New Yorker". The New York Times. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
- ↑ Schmidt, Alex (22 January 2018). "How Predictive Text Gave Us A New Harry Potter Chapter". The Cracked Podcast (Podcast). Cracked.com. Event occurs at 17:08. Retrieved 12 August 2026.
- ↑ "Zach Braff reprises his 'Scrubs' character to read a script written by an A.I." Digital Trends. 19 December 2017. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
- ↑ 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.
External links
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