People are amazing, aren’t they?
“A Scottish artist has rigged a computer program to automatically generate new scripts for the ’90s television sitcom Friends. Andy Herd of Dundee, Scotland put every script in the show’s history into his computer as part of an experiment to learn about machine learning.The computer learned to recognize sequences in the scripts and eventually began to create its own.
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“I fed a recurrent neural network with the scripts for every episode of friends and it learned to generate new scenes,” Herd wrote on Twitter as he shared examples of the computer’s work. Herd told the Daily Beast that the computer generates scenes by predicting the next letter in a sequence based on the information provided by the Friends scripts.
The computer can quickly recreate the structure of a television script through this process, but the content likely wouldn’t be suitable for the upcoming Friends reunion “It can generate stuff within minutes, but it’s barely English,” he said. “A lot of it is still nonsense.””