Image courtesy of Botnik
“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.”And so begins a whole chapter of AI-generated Harry Potter fanfiction titled Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. The chapter goes on like this for about four pages and never achieves anything approaching sense, but somehow reads like a lobotomised version of JK Rowling.The chapter comes courtesy of an organisation called Botnik, who describe themselves as “a community of writers, artists, and developers collaborating with machines to create strange new things.”Botnik wrote a Large Pile of Ash with something they're calling a predictive keyboard, which is an AI bot that's able to predict words and phrases in a given piece of writing based on what came before. This is basically the same predictive text function that's on your phone, except that Botnik’s version can be calibrated on particular writing styles.In this case the bot trawled all seven Harry Potter books to memorise their vocabulary and phrasing. The predictive keyboard was then created to spit out Harry Potter-esque sentences. Botnik previously created a few of these keyboards for such styles of writing as Buzzfeed Quizzes, X-Files, and Seinfeld—but the new one made everything read like it was (sort of) written by JK Rowling.A team of Botnik's writers then used the Harry Potter keyboard to write slabs of text that were then submitted for curation. The best submissions were chosen and artfully woven together, and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash is the result.And yes it’s a pretty wild ride, but the chapter somehow manages to achieve a kind of surrealist poetry. “Leathery sheets of rain lashed at Harry’s ghost,” reads one memorable passage. “Ron was standing there and doing a kind of frenzied tap dance. He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione's family.”@MorgansJulian
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