I Forced a Bot

Confirmed 247,103

Part of a series on Harry Potter Predictive Text Chapter. [View Related Entries]

About

I Forced a Bot refers to a series of social media posts in which the author claims to have developed a computer system that generators non-sensical versions of popular culture after ingesting roughly 1,000 hours of content. These posts parody several viral news stories about actual bots recreating works of culture.

Origin

In December 2017, Botnik Studios, received viral attention for their Harry Potter Predictive Text Chapter, a humorous version of the Harry Potter fantasy novels written through predictive text.

On February 21st, 2018, comedian and writer Keaton Patti tweeted, ^[1] "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 episodes of Jerry Springer and then asked it to write an episode of its own. Here is the first page." The post (shown below), which received more than 75 retweets and 200 likes in five months, parodied the stories about Botnik's and fellow bot-based companies.

Spread

Several weeks later, on February 27th, Patti posted another version of his bot tweet.^[2] He wrote, "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Pirates of the Caribbean movies and then asked it to write a Pirates movie of its own. Here is the first page." Within five months, the post (shown below, left) received more than 9,100 retweets and 19,000 likes.

Two days later, on March 1st, he tweeted,^[3] "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of the Saw movies and then asked it to write a Saw movie of its own. Here is the first page." The post (shown below, center) received more than 23,000 retweets and 52,000 likes in four months.

Shortly after, parodies of Patti's tweets began appearing online. On March 3rd, Twitter^[4] user @JerryQDepew tweeted (shown below, right), "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Adam Sandler movies and then asked it to write another one, but all my knives are missing now?"

Over the next several months, Patti continued to post supposedly bot-generated content. On June 13th, he posted his most popular version, tweeting,^[5] "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then asked it to write an Olive Garden commercial of its own. Here is the first page." The post (shown below) received more than 100,000 retweets and 265,000 likes in two days.

That day, Twitter^[6] user @JanelleCShane tweeted that the posted bot-generated posts were fake. She wrote, "These "I forced a bot to watch X" posts are almost certainly 100% human-written with no bot involved. Here's how you can tell." The post (shown below) recevied more than 6,000 retweets and 16,000 likes in two days.

She continued:

"First of all, neural nets learn by example. If you show it 1,000 hours of video (assuming 120,000 unique 30-sec Olive Garden commercials exist), you’ll get video out, not a script with stage directions. Notice that this script has the same main characters and scenario the entire way through. An actual neural net’s story will tend to meander dreamlike because it forgets what it was doing[…]Neural nets also have trouble contructing complex sentences, unless its data contains lots of examples of that particular type."

Several media outlets covered Patti's post as well as the debunking, including Gizmodo,^[7] Mashable, ^[8] The Daily Dot, ^[9] The Take Out^[10] and more.