Bot attempts to write Harry Potter fan fiction, with amazing results

Thanks to Botnik, a self-described “community of writers, artists and developers collaborating with machines to create strange new things,” Harry Potter has been reimagined with the help of a predictive text keyboard — and the result is hilarious and strange.

The team at Botnik ran all seven Harry Potter books through the predictive writing bot and then directed it to write a story based on the books. The result, titled Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, is by turns weird and beautiful, all the while reading surprisingly like a Harry Potter book. Behold such lines as “Ron stood there and doing a kind of frenzied tap dance. He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.”

The story ends with Harry “falling down the staircase for the rest of the summer” and then shouting, “The dark arts better be worried, oh boy!”

Botnik.org has also unleashed its predictive text bot on marijuana strain names (fancy some “banana zero sativa”?), advertisements, and so much more, promising hours of fun. Don’t miss it.

–Via The Guardian