An AI Wrote Its Own Harry Potter Fan Fiction: Read It Here
Artificial intelligence has been used to write poems, generate rap, transform doodles into proper artwork and create realistic photos from nothing. How about writing actual stories, though? That's just what Botnik Studios' own creation did, using what it learned from the official Harry Potter books to create its own chapter based on them. These pages are noncanonical, of course, but assuming you don't mind apocryphal works, it's worth giving a read.
Botnik Studios shared its creation via a tweet (below), where it explained that it used predictive keyboards that were trained with all seven books in the Harry Potter series. Training is the key part to AIs like this, teaching it what it needs to know so that it can attempt to create its own version of the thing. In this case, that thing is titled "Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash." Clearly the AI didn't get the lesson on brevity.
We used predictive keyboards trained on all seven books to ghostwrite this spellbinding new Harry Potter chapter https://t.co/UaC6rMlqTy pic.twitter.com/VyxZwMYVVy
— Botnik Studios (@botnikstudios) December 12, 2017
The AI's fan fiction story is only three pages long; if you weren't paying close attention, you may be tricked into thinking you're reading something written by a person, though certainly not anything from the author herself. The language is fun at time, describing things like a "magically magnified wind" and "leathery sheets of rain." Its tendency toward flowery prose aside, the AI has all the makings of a fiction author.
The story is presented on actual paper, helping give it that realistic feel. The opening paragraph reads:
The castle grounds snarled with a wave of magically magnified wind. The sky outside was a great black ceiling, which was full of blood. The only sounds drifting from Hagrid's hut were the disdainful shrieks of his own furniture. Magic: it was something that Harry Potter thought was very good.
Some parts are especially comical, such as this gem: "Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself." While amusing to read, the chapter does highlight a big deficit in the AI's abilities: its story doesn't go anywhere. While the sentences make sense enough at times to get an idea of what the machine is talking about, there's very little actual substance to the words, leaving the readers with mostly nonsense.
SOURCE: Botnik Studios