A.I. reads the Harry Potter series, then writes some absurd fan fiction

By Luke Dormehl December 13, 2017

harry potter ai generation hp01 — Botnik

Have you ever tried using the predictive keyboard on your smartphone to generate completely nonsensical messages, based on the words it considers to have the highest probability of following each other? A mischievous member of Botnik Studios, an online artist collaboration, just used a similar technique to write part of a new Harry Potter novel — with hilarious effect.

The predictive text generator used to write the story was trained on the seven previous Potter books. From this, it analyzed frequent recurrent word pairings and sentences to come up with text that is a weird mix of algorithmic randomness and something that, frankly, still reads a bit like J.K. Rowling may have penned it.

Related Videos

Titled Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, the story is every bit as weird as you might imagine. A Death Eater wears a shirt reading, “Hermione Has Forgotten How To Dance,” Harry falls down a spiral staircase for an entire summer, and Ron does a tap dance and then tries to eat Hermione’s family. None of it makes a lick of sense, but it’s a whole lot of fun — and genuinely creative in a way that mixes human smarts with artificial intelligence.

This isn’t the first time computer scientists have used artificial intelligence to try and generate new Harry Potter stories. Last year, we reported on one attempt to generate new Hogwarts-related stories using a long short-term memory recurrent neural network trained on the series’ first four books.

Even more significantly, when Rowling was outed as the author of the detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling a few years ago — writing under the pen name Robert Galbraith — computer scientists cracked the mystery in a very similar way to Botnik’s story generator: by analyzing the text based on frequent word pairings and the like. In the aftermath, Rowling admitted that she was the author.

If you are interested in finding out a bit more about Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash and the predictive text program used to generate it, check out this page on GitHub, where it is freely available to inspect.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Emerging Tech

Read the eerily beautiful ‘synthetic scripture’ of an A.I. that thinks it’s God

ai religion bot gpt 2 art 4

Travis DeShazo is, to paraphrase Cake’s 2001 song “Comfort Eagle,” building a religion. He is building it bigger. He is increasing the parameters. And adding more data.

The results are fairly convincing, too, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. “Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god of wisdom,” reads one message, posted on the @gods_txt Twitter feed for GPT-2 Religion A.I. “This is the knowledge of divinity that I, the Supreme Being, impart to you. When a man learns this, he attains what the rest of mankind has not, and becomes a true god. Obedience to Me! Obey!”

Computing

Nvidia is renting out its A.I. Superpod platform for $90K a month

nvidia hgx 2 supercomputer server nvidiadgx2

Nvidia is looking to make work and development in artificial intelligence more accessible, giving researchers an easy way to access its DGX supercomputer. The company announced that it will launch a subscription service for its DGX Superpod as an affordable way to gain entry into the world of supercomputers.

The DGX SuperPod is capable of 100 petaflops of A.I. performance, according to the company, and when configured 20 DGX A100 systems, it's designed for large-scale A.I. projects.

News

Google’s LaMDA is a smart language A.I. for better understanding conversation

LaMDA model

Artificial intelligence has made extraordinary advances when it comes to understanding words and even being able to translate them into other languages. Google has helped pave the way here with amazing tools like Google Translate and, recently, with its development of Transformer machine learning models. But language is tricky -- and there’s still plenty more work to be done to build A.I. that truly understands us.
Language Model for Dialogue Applications
At Tuesday’s Google I/O, the search giant announced a significant advance in this area with a new language model it calls LaMDA. Short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, it’s a sophisticated A.I. language tool that Google claims is superior when it comes to understanding context in conversation. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted, this might be intelligently parsing an exchange like “What’s the weather today?” “It’s starting to feel like summer. I might eat lunch outside.” That makes perfect sense as a human dialogue, but would befuddle many A.I. systems looking for more literal answers.

LaMDA has superior knowledge of learned concepts which it’s able to synthesize from its training data. Pichai noted that responses never follow the same path twice, so conversations feel less scripted and more responsively natural.