This new chapter of 'Harry Potter' written by a bot is absolutely hilarious nonsense
"Harry tore his eyes from his head and threw them into the forest"
If - and I don’t want to anger the fans here - you think about it, Harry Potter is nonsense, isn’t it? Broomsticks and dragons and owls and talking paintings and whatever Hagrid is - it’s all over the place, every idea thrown at the wall. Thankfully, most of it sticks, and if you accept all the craziness at a base level, then it makes sense, overall.
However, what absolutely, positively does not make sense is a new chapter of Harry Potter fan-fiction that is currently going viral. This is because it was written by a computer, not J.K. Rowling.
Essentially, someone got a set of predictive keyboards that were trained on all the Harry Potter novels, and got them to come up with a new chapter. It’s called Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, and is - I don’t put this lightly - hilarious:
It’s worrying, when you spend your days trying to be funny on the internet, that a computer has you beaten to a sweaty pulp. Robots are funny now, everyone - their jokes are better than yours.
At least I think they are - there’s a small part of me (but you already knew that didn’t you) that thinks there must have been some human tampering here. Like take the bit where Harry throws his eyes into the forest - in the next sentence it refers back to him not having any eyes, and I don’t understand how a computer would know this, or make that joke.
Then again, I do not understand computers, so who knows how it all works. You can find the predictive keyboards here, and I guess using them involves human interaction, anyway, so maybe just ignore the technophobic luddite who filed this article on paper, typed on a typewriter, while wearing a tinfoil hat.
(Images: Botnik)
