Bot Writes New Harry Potter Book (opens in new tab)

This sounds like a nitpick but I feel very strongly about this: this is not "written by a bot", it is written by a human (actually, several humans) assisted by a bot. In particular, it was written by human beings using constrained predictive text keyboards that were trained on a Harry Potter corpus. As a general rule of thumb, even in 2017, if you're reading "bot-created" text that feels nonsensical but grammatical, it's either highly-constrained in its generation process (e.g. using templates), human-curated, or human-directed.

Here's the actual announcement from Botnik, which clearly uses the phrase "predictive keyboards": https://twitter.com/botnikstudios/status/940627812259696643 You can actually experiment with the exact process used! The predictive text keyboards they created are available online: one for narration and one for dialogue.

narration: http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=d08198a9a936f791b7ffe1...

dialogue: http://botnik.org/apps/writer/?source=4210c86ded39e6380ad0e1...

As funny as this is, I'm actually really looking forward to the day I can generate an entire, unique fantasy epic on par with the best human authors of today with the push of a button.

AI-generated entertainment in general is going to be awesome.

It reads like "Bored of the Rings", but without the sly humor.