AI-written ‘Harry Potter’ fanfiction attempts to capture Rowling wizarding world

Image: Botnik Studios

Though Harry Potter’s saga has long ended, fans continue to imagine the fictional character’s life after the books and the movies. Fanfiction about it continue to flourish on the internet, and one of these has been written by an artificial intelligence program.

Botnik Studios revealed a three-page fanfiction work titled “The Handsome One”, written with the help of an AI.  The AI was incorporated into a predictive keyboard program which was trained with all seven volumes of the “Harry Potter” book series.

The story’s plot appears to be nonsensical, with lines like, “Ron was standing there and doing a kind of frenzied tap dance. He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.” The choice of words still vaguely conveyed that the events happened within Harry Potter’s wizarding world.

Image: Botnik Studios

Botnik calls their process “collaborating with machines,” which mixes human writing creativity with machine input, while trying to imitate humans.

Image: Botnik Studios

The group pegs their predictive keyboards as writing tools that help in coming up with ideas for a written work.

Botnik’s online predictive keyboard has also been trained with several sources other than the Harry Potter books. It can be used to write stories, lyrics, advertisements and more. JB

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