Someone Used Predictive Text To Write A New Chapter Of Harry Potter And It’s Extraordinary
"Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself."
“Leathery sheets of rain lashed at Harry’s ghost as he walked across the grounds toward the castle. Ron was standing there and doing a kind of frenzied tap dance. He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.”
This is the beginning of a new chapter of Harry Potter, written just this week. You may notice some subtle differences from the original, but that’s because this chapter was written, no joke, by predictive text.
It’s not just any predictive text, either. A group of writers, artists and tech nerds called Botnik has spent time training a predictive keyboard with the text of all seven Harry Potter books, resulting in a program that writes uncannily Rowling-esque prose, albeit a little weirder. A group of writers sat down to muck around with the algorithm, and out of this human/machine collaboration came the greatest work of literature of this decade.
We used predictive keyboards trained on all seven books to ghostwrite this spellbinding new Harry Potter chapter https://t.co/UaC6rMlqTy pic.twitter.com/VyxZwMYVVy
— Botnik Studios (@botnikstudios) December 12, 2017
A lot of what the predictive text produced is pretty indistinguishable from the actual books, dialogue in particular. “‘If you two can’t clump happily, I’m going to get aggressive,’ confessed the reasonable Hermione” is a particularly on-brand line.
“‘I’m Harry Potter,’ Harry began yelling. ‘The dark arts better be worried, oh boy!'” is also basically a line from the books.
Sometimes, the algorithm even managed to outdo the books. See for example this instance of clear, communicative relationship-building between some passing Death Eaters, which perfectly humanises the dark side while coming closer to LGBTIQ+ representation than any of the original books managed to.
Of course, while most of the individual lines here were generated by the predictive keyboard, it did take a team of writers to pick out the best bits and assemble them into a coherent narrative, so we writers aren’t totally obsolete just yet.
It's not automated! We have a team of writers who all use the Botnik predictive text keyboard. We trained keyboards on all 7 books and had a big writing jam. Then I took the best pieces of copy, arranged them into a narrative, and wrote some copy to fill in the gaps.
— Nat Towsen (@NatTowsen) December 12, 2017
Still, the keyboard itself is pretty stunning, and capable of producing some incredibly funny stuff. Don’t take my word for it, though — you can try it out here (this keyboard generates narration, and this one generates dialogue).
You can check out the rest of the cool stuff Botnik works on — and join them, if you want — here.
–
Feature image via BotnikStudios on Twitter