I Forced a Bot

I Forced a Bot

Part of a series on Harry Potter Predictive Text Chapter. [View Related Entries]

Updated Jan 24, 2022 at 01:27AM EST by Autumn Able.

Added Jun 15, 2018 at 10:40AM EDT by Matt.

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About

I Forced a Bot refers to a series of social media posts in which the author claims to have developed a computer system that generators non-sensical versions of popular culture after ingesting roughly 1,000 hours of content. These posts parody several viral news stories about actual bots recreating works of culture.

Origin

In December 2017, Botnik Studios, received viral attention for their Harry Potter Predictive Text Chapter, a humorous version of the Harry Potter fantasy novels written through predictive text.

On February 21st, 2018, comedian and writer Keaton Patti tweeted, [1] "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 episodes of Jerry Springer and then asked it to write an episode of its own. Here is the first page." The post (shown below), which received more than 75 retweets and 200 likes in five months, parodied the stories about Botnik's and fellow bot-based companies.


Keaton Patti @KeatonPatti l forced a bot to watch over 1,000 episodes of Jerry Springer and then asked it to write an episode of its own Here is the first page JERRY PR DICTIVE T-- J1RRY ฮ.PR1nER Welcome to the atage, hio parente. UMBLENEED and ANOTHER TUMBLEWEED come on etage INT JERRY SPRINGER'S BRAIN AUDIENCE NO SOUP! FOR YOUI NO SOUPI FOR YOU! Today on the ahow we have a big bleweed and Another Tumbleweed fight Tumbleweed p HAIR peraon. Jerry Jerry! Jerryt Jerry! His parente are fed up with hie AUDIENCE CHAIR Hey, don't pick me up JERRY Tumbleweed doeen t lieten. bigness AUDIENCE LISTEN TO THE CHAIR! LISTEN TO THE CHAIR LISTEN TO THE CHAIR! AUDIENCE Seinfeld! Seinfeld! Seinfeld! Seinfeld! , Tumbleweed doe8n't list JERRY JERRY So we sent him to a prison bootoamp to scare him little We'1l be back after thie commercial Eor coffee you can't drink AUDIENCE kramer Kramer Kraner! Kraner


Spread

Several weeks later, on February 27th, Patti posted another version of his bot tweet.[2] He wrote, "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Pirates of the Caribbean movies and then asked it to write a Pirates movie of its own. Here is the first page." Within five months, the post (shown below, left) received more than 9,100 retweets and 19,000 likes.

Two days later, on March 1st, he tweeted,[3] "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of the Saw movies and then asked it to write a Saw movie of its own. Here is the first page." The post (shown below, center) received more than 23,000 retweets and 52,000 likes in four months.

Shortly after, parodies of Patti's tweets began appearing online. On March 3rd, Twitter[4] user @JerryQDepew tweeted (shown below, right), "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Adam Sandler movies and then asked it to write another one, but all my knives are missing now?"


Keaton Patti @KeatonPatti I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Pirates of the Caribbean movies and then asked it to write a Pirates movie of its own Here is the first page. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD TAL DEAD DEAD DIE DEPP DEAD DEAD 2 POSEIDON I have a mission for you, at the end of the ocean! EXT. CARIBBEAN [RA KNIGHTLEY, the woman from Atonement (2007), CAPTAIN JACK SPARRON, pirates arou boat ship, sword in hand POSEIDON, Pope of the Water, jumps is the water, so now there's no wa KEIRA Time for some Atonement (2007) SPARROW Argh ! The water i8 gone! SMASE POSEIDON SILENCE! . CARIBBEAN Poseidon's eyes are beach balls SMAS POSEIDON (CONT Are you THE Jack Sparro other terrible movies? CARIBBEAN SMASH SPARROW That depends.. .what's in THE Jack Sparrow? .SOMEBODY ONCE TOLD ME THE WORLD WAS GONNA RO Tack drinks a bottle of Bacardi ru real bats Keaton Patti @KeatonPatti l forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of the Saw movies and then asked it to write a Saw movie of its own. Here is the first page. SEXY DOLL Becky, you are ineide a whale SAW 9: SAWITDABA DA BANG DA BANG DIGG cky now realizes she's inside a whale. She's fine w INT. WHALE SEXY DOLL (CONT D) A sexy woman, BECKY SEXWOMAN, įs cove a bed. She s in a whale, but doesn't I hid the key to this whale inside your pancrea BECKY (whispers to self) BECKY AH! Blood is supposed to inside my body, not outside Good thing I'm a pancreas doctor SEXY DOLL An old TV turns on. We know it's old cobwebs and voted for Trump. The doll appears on the screen, but this time he's sexier because he's covered in s But since I know you're a pancreas doctor, I took it out of your pancreas and put it in one of your kidneys. The cool one SEXY DOLL (whispers to self) Hello, Becky. Want to play Ah, f---. I don't know kidneys countdown starts counting down from one hour on the BECKY Yes. of course. Don't be si Yes. 100%. Game please. SEXY DOLL Whoa, what the f--- is that? i didn't do that. Who did that? Becky still doesn't realize she's ins e whale did that I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Adam Sandler movies and then asked it to write another one, but all my knives are missing now?

Over the next several months, Patti continued to post supposedly bot-generated content. On June 13th, he posted his most popular version, tweeting,[5] "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then asked it to write an Olive Garden commercial of its own. Here is the first page." The post (shown below) received more than 100,000 retweets and 265,000 likes in two days.


Keaton Patti @KeatonPatti I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then asked it to write an Olive Garden commercial of its own. Here is the first page E GARDEN COMMERCIAL FRIEND 3 Leave without me. I'm home OLIVE GARDEN RESTAURANT WAITRESS Gluten Classico. From the kitchen oup of FRIENDS laughs at a dinner table. A WAITR eliver what could be considered food : Gluten Classico. We believe the waitress tl he kitchen. We have no reason not to believ WAITRESS Pasta nachos for you 4 says nothing ee the pasta nachos. They're warm and defeated FRIEND 1 PRIEND 1 What is wrong, Friend 4? The menu is here WAITRESS 4 says nothing Lasagna winge with extra Italy FRIEND 2 ee the laeagna wings. There'e more Italy than ne Friend 4, what is wrong, Friend 4? FRIEND 2 I shall eat Italian citizens. 4 smiles wide. Her mouth is full of secret WAITRESS Unlimited stick. (wet voice) Olive Garden. When You're Here, You're Here. ee the unlimited stick. It is infinite. It is al

That day, Twitter[6] user @JanelleCShane tweeted that the posted bot-generated posts were fake. She wrote, "These "I forced a bot to watch X" posts are almost certainly 100% human-written with no bot involved. Here's how you can tell." The post (shown below) recevied more than 6,000 retweets and 16,000 likes in two days.



She continued:

"First of all, neural nets learn by example. If you show it 1,000 hours of video (assuming 120,000 unique 30-sec Olive Garden commercials exist), you’ll get video out, not a script with stage directions. Notice that this script has the same main characters and scenario the entire way through. An actual neural net’s story will tend to meander dreamlike because it forgets what it was doing[…]Neural nets also have trouble contructing complex sentences, unless its data contains lots of examples of that particular type."

Several media outlets covered Patti's post as well as the debunking, including Gizmodo,[7] Mashable, [8] The Daily Dot, [9] The Take Out[10] and more.

Various Examples

Keaton Patti @KeatonPatti I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of the Transformers movies and then asked it to write a Transformers movie of its own Here is the first page 1998 CAMRY I have transformed. Your turn. ANSFORMERS 6: CARS BECOME OTHER CARS t 2003 Elantra transforms into a DVD of Pixar' s г. JUNK YARD -NIGHT (POST-DAY) DVD OF CARS 2 GUY WITH HAIR locks the gate to the junk yard I have transformed. GUY WITH HAIR Good night, junk. I have to go to 1998 CAMRY Now we must wait for optimus Prime my daughter's birthday party- ildn't have a birthday. He falls off a cliff. 크ntra. we think they're normal cars, but we're lies. The guy doesn't have a daughter, and if wait 3 years. An Uber drives up to the unk see a 1996 Toyota Camry parked next to a 2003 1 y're Transformers 1998 CAMRY (CONT'D) Optimus Prime is here UBER It is I, Optimus Prime. I must transform 1996 CAMRY The human has left. : Uber transforms into a Lyft. 2003 ELANTRA LYFT Yes. We can now transform into our true identities. Now let's Shia LaBeouf. 1996 Toyota Camry transforms into a 1998 Toyot cars all shia LaBeouf until they run out of g Tired of waiting for the next season of Game of Thrones? Given up on the hope that George RR Martin will ever finish the next book? Worry not, I forced a bot to learn every single book from the ASOIAF series, and asked it to write the most likely ending This is an extract. Birds festered in the cro wd and alag-about arekery. .14id. blood squirted out of Tyrion Lannister, as his shoulders slumped, hard, against the King. They struck her face between two fish as easily as a beetroot that spilled over the sea. The bloody trees were moving away from Westeros, and they roamed the North. All Bran had to do was no thing. His Aya s looking at Grezbeard's wagons hanging from his eyes, he wheeled them back and forth until they made her skin crawl. confortable. Iyrion sighed a great deal, as heaa dead. "ell thia ia sbeurd", he refleeted. The King pointed to ㄾ child, and aid ·lt 1 feeble and helpless and I abould coaand it to die. The Kle豸 was called Cutjack wa8 the Lord of Light. sround the Prince, anorted, and sallow manhood. "Perbsps you1 nilk it?" he asked. Arza threw is in his eyes. "No".,he thought politelz The Iron Throne wae gro ing taller with every stroke, and Jon could hear the laughter of his uncle follow him to Dorne like the shrieks of a vengeful moth. The children exchanged uneasy glances. His sword hilt horse?"ced nd oiled" ..Yotg will oot be Queen! he relled, and swept her oush off her face. The naid was dead aad ber Bunder l forced a bot to read over 1,000 tweets claiming to be scripts written by bots online, then asked it to write a script itself. It wrote these two pages, then hung itself SITTING ON A Low MOUND, IS CHECKING TWITTER ON BOTH HIS PHONE INULTANEOUSLY VLADIMIR es on their own They all follow the same structure boring greetings that perfectly follow genre a set of tions ADIMİR a string of incoherent uxtapositions that merely exist to ish the lie of being created by a robot, that waste the reader's Several pages spread over ultiple inages, only for the ultimate ine to be a slightly incongruous image that would have been ruous no matter what, and is not improved by all the setup ESTRAGON to be done VLADIMIR nning to come around to that opinion myself. Especially with to jokes on Twitter, where the premise is that nt written by a robot, despite being written by a human q time is part of the genre, as if to let the reader thinkoh obviously a robot wouldn't have a straight throughline from to joke."But if the audience already knows it's a Joke, it's in re a piece ESTRAGON t's inherently wrong with a joke having a ie as part of its k you're just jealous that they get more retweets than your treatises on comedy VLADIMIR VLADIMIR joke wouldn't be funny without it being framed as being ereated ve actor, then is it really furny at all? The premise "a robot expect conedy to actually make me laugh! lis" is just asking the audience to lower their standards ESTRAGON ESTRAGON I think they're funny. So do thousands of other people, ally? Isn't that just part of the setup of the joke? "But I AM Pagliacci" isn't funny without the premise that a man a doctor, yet implies no dishonesty by asking the reader to : that a man went to the doctor ntly. I don't think we're going to agree on this one g to be done think of only one thing VLADIMIR VLADIMIR rue. But the joke is still funny if you don't believe that the : to the doctor. Is the sane true for the robot joke, if you : as a joke with a robot in the premise, and not a joke created ON STARTS BREAKDANCING ot? Is it really? ESTRAGON ENE sing you don't think it is
i forced a bot to let over 1,000 jokes go over its head on twitter and then asked it to write a comment on this tweet. here is the comment. Maximilian von Gaisberg @grunzwanzling42 Follow Replying to @KeatonPatti The script is great, but I highly doubt that a bot actually did write that. The overall structure is way to coherent even for state- of-the-art neural networks. There are also things in there that don't appear in any Saw movie like "Trump" or "Whale" 2:38 PM-3 Mar 2018 8 Retweets 644 Likes Keaton Patti @KeatonPatti I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Fox News segments and then asked it to write a Fox News segment of its own. Here is the first page FOX NEWS WHITEMAN (CONT'D) NEWS FLASH: We've got 9/11 calling in to the show. Hello, 9/11? INT. NEWS SEWER LOCK HER UP A news anchor, GUY WHITEMAN, sits on a y Obama just Sandy Hooked Bengha A graphic appears on screen with the tex The graphic dies. Cut back to the anchor Earlier today, Jeb Bush offere for a pound of Muslims and Tru A picture of Jeb Bush eating his own hea The picture dies. Cut back to the anchor WHITEMAN WHITEMAN Lock her up? again! LOCK HER UP OBAMA STOPPED THE HOLOCAUST = ZERO. l dies. Cut back to the anchor WHITEMAN Good call. WHITEMAN (CONT 'D) buy America from President Tr WHITEMAN (CONT'D) Up next, samantha Bee admits she's the ghost of Osama bin Laden and that there's nothing wrong with that. But first, is Amazon gay? We think so and don't need proof. said no no no. blood I forced a bot to watch all 236 episodes of Friends and then asked it to write an episode of its own. Here are the first 59 pages. 10 13 14 16 18 25 26 29 34 38 29 50 57 58 59


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