If Artificial Intelligence can write this good a Harry Potter story, we’re doomed.
All seven of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books were fed into a predictive text keyboard in order to see if artificial intelligence could write a story better than anything contained in the original series. Well, we have an answer.
Bots write better fiction than the woman who saved the publishing industry.
Behold, Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, Chapter Thirteen: The Handsome One.
Featuring many of the beloved original characters, there are a few new faces created by the bot, such as Mr. Staircase, ‘the shabby-robed ghost’ who will be the next fan favourite.
The story follows Harry, Ron and Hermione as they attempt to listen in on a polite meeting held by the politest members of Lord Voldemort’s Death Eater army. This includes one such Death Eater who has decided against wearing his uniform in favour of a t-shirt that reads, ‘Hermione Has Forgotten How To Dance’.
It would be fair to say, the bot has taken the franchise off in a new direction.
An early Christmas gift given to us by Botnik, a group of writers from the US who look at the lighter side of AI, here some of the greatest gems to come from what is already an instant classic:
- ‘Magic: It was something that Harry Potter thought was very good.’
- ‘Ron was standing there and doing a kind of frenzied tap dance. He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.’
- ‘”If you two can’t clump reasonably, I am going to get aggressive”, confessed the reasonable Hermione.”
- ‘Ron’s Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.’
- ‘The password was “BEEF WOMEN”, Hermione cried.’
- ‘Ron threw a wand at Voldemort and everyone applauded. Ron smiled. Ron reached for this wand slowly.’
- ‘”Not so handsome now”, thought Harry as he dipped Hermione in hot sauce.’
- ‘Mountains of mice exploded.’
- ‘Harry looked around and then fell down the spiral staircase for the rest of the summer.’
If you were planning on revisiting the series over Christmas, add Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash to your list. It’s so good, even the Dursley family decided to talk about the book inside the book.
This is a book that clumps reasonably with Rowling’s series.
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