How Predictive Text Gave Us A New Harry Potter Chapter
If there's one book the entire planet wants to read right this second, it's Harry Potter and the Eighth Novel That's As Good As The First Seven. So far J.K. Rowling hasn't given it to us, because she's been TOO LAZY (and when we say "too lazy", we mean she's written a play and a movie franchise and adult novels and good tweets). So what if someone else could replicate her work, and write us more Potter? Also what if that writer was a machine? And what if that machine delivered utterly brilliant scene descriptions like "Ron was going to be spiders. He just was." that made us realize how funny Harry Potter oughta be?
On this week's episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt sits down with Jamie Brew, Elle O'Brien, & Mike Frederickson, a team of comedians & tech wizards from Botnik. They'll dig into how Botnik's predictive text technology combines with actual living breathing humans, to find fun jokes within the relentless advance of automation. They'll also discover a digital future that might actually be worth looking forward to. And they'll even deliver The Cracked Podcast's first ever dramatic literary reading.
Footnotes:
Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like A Large Pile of Ash by Botnik Studios
Dramatic Reading Cast (in order of appearance):
Jamie Brew: narrator
Elle O'Brien: Hermione Granger
Alex Schmidt: Ron Weasley, Death Eater 1, Dumbledore
Mike Frederickson: Mr. Staircase, Death Eater 2, Harry Potter
Hilarious illustrations of Botnik's Potter chapter by @sketchshark
"Holiday Update" by Botnik Studios
Seinfeld S0XE1 by Botnik Studios
I trained a neural network on Red Lobster tweets and all it does is generate apologies (Medium)
Pew Research Center Mobile Fact Sheet
Americans Think the Robot Revolution Is Coming But Not For Their Jobs (Gizmodo)
"Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do." - Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without A Country
Upcoming Botnik live show dates: SEATTLE on Feb. 4th at The Annex (w/ Emmett Montgomery), and CHICAGO on Mar. 12th at The Hideout Inn
And see The Cracked Podcast LIVE at UCB Sunset in Los Angeles on Feb. 10th! More details soon.
