Comedians Outsourcing Jokes to AI...


Heard the One About the Robot Comedian?

Editorial Board 25 May 2018, 3:15 AM 25 May 2018, 3:00 AM

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Botnik is creating an unusual predictive keyboard—suggesting words based on what’s been typed—to generate everything from scripts for new episodes of Seinfeld to funny Valentine’s Day recipes. The results are by design weird as hell.

The Benefit

Art created by artificial intelligence has become a reliable success in the finicky world of viral content, resulting in everything from eerie cat drawings to dadaist punk music. Botnik’s interactive keyboards let anyone create surreal rearrangements of familiar words.

Innovators

Jamie Brew, 27, is the former head writer of the Onion’s sister site ClickHole, and Bob Mankoff, 74, is the humor editor at Esquire.

Origin

At the New Yorker, Mankoff created the caption contest, spawning a huge data set mined by Google. This piqued his interest in AI, and he got in touch with Brew, who’d been exploring the topic by sending texts on the iPhone’s predictive keyboard. Botnik made its debut in 2016, then landed a $100,000 contract from Amazon.com Inc. to help make its Alexa AI assistant sound more human.

Deployment

Comedy writers, programmers, and designers collaborate on a workplace chat service, leading to viral hits such as a fake banner for the Coachella festival (headliners include Lil Hack and Horse Choir).

Goal

Ultimately, Brew looks at the content created by the broader Botnik community as advertisements for the real product: the virtual keyboards themselves, which roughly 1,000 people per day play around on. Two full-time programmers have been working on a broader platform evolved from the keyboards, to be unveiled this summer. Eventually, Brew and Mankoff hope to charge for access to the platform.

The Verdict

Mankoff and Brew look at Botnik as an agent for creativity, flying in the face of other utopian ideas about AI. The goal isn’t to automate writing, they say, but to collaborate with AI to make strange new forms of it. “Humans need to be part of it,” Mankoff says.

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/traders-carnival/2018/05/25/traders-carnival-atul-suri-on-trading-the-indian-stock-market-in-times-of-volatility

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke...
Read more

Report: World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China

World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 ·           A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media  reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling.  “You barely feel that th...
Read more

New ATM's: withdraw money with veins in your finger

New cash machines: withdraw money with veins in your finger Cash machine technology that reads the pattern of finger veins is already available in Japan and Poland   By Telegraph Reporters 6:59PM BST 15 May 2014 Cash machines could soon be installed with devices that identify customers by reading the veins in their fingers. The technology is already being rolled out in Poland, where 1,730 cash machines will this year be installed with readers, negating the need for a debit card and Pin. Developed by Hitachi, the Japanese electronics firm, the machines read the patterns of the veins just below the surface of the skin on your finger using infra-red sensors. The light is partially absorbed by haemoglobin in the veins to capture a unique finger vein pattern profile, which is matched to a profile. The technology is used by Japanese banks and also in Turkey, offering “groundbreaking levels of accuracy and speed of authentication”, Hitachi said, which in t...
Read more