While you were busy missing your favorite 90’s high-on-nostalgia sitcom Friends, one guy created a program to pen the new episodes. Andy Herd, a software developer from Dundee and creator of the Pandyland web comic, used a recurrent neural network – a form of artificial intelligence that has proven to be relatively adapted at understanding and forming language – to generate the new scripts.
Andy says “I was encouraged by childlike mindfulness during possibilities of machine
learning and how it could be practical to humor,” Herd pronounced over email. “I
consider scripts are indeed improved than some stream TV sitcoms. I have perceived a lot of certain feedback.”
The Algorithm
This is an artificial intelligence program, which when fed with scripts from the entire Friends back catalog, has produced hilarious, if not entirely up to scratch, new scenes for the show.
The network re-creates the back-and-forth conversations between the show’s six lead members, including faithfully adding character traits such as Chandler beginning sentences with “so,” and Joey’s “seriously”, although they probably wouldn’t be accepted by the show’s producers.
To sight a computer,Herd used a neural network, a form of synthetic comprehension in which
the mechanism was fed each part from a renowned ’90s comedy. The computer afterwards schooled patterns to beget new scenes. This technique is used in other instances, such as a renounced Microsoft mechanism program in China that was learned to lift on conversations with users by
studying existent conversations.
Advantages and Disadvantages:
There have been huge advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, with speech, image and text recognition as well as sentence formation improving markedly. This is enabling a wave of semi-intelligent assistants and customer service bots.
Humour is seen as one of the final frontiers of artificial intelligence, being one of the most difficult things for computers to understand, which is perhaps unsurprising since psychologists also don’t understand it nearly as well as other psychological phenomena.
Most jokes told by robots have been pretty elementary, and pun based –
“What do you call a strange market? A Bizarre Bazaar”.
While this robot writer can’t match the level of original writing, one could easily feel the familiar sense of humor in these instances:
Joey: “Yeah!”
Rachel: “Okay!”
Gary: “Okay.”
Joey: “Yeah!”
Monica: “Oh my God!”
Phoebe: “maybe you need a pizza.”
Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time someone has tried to use artificial intelligence to produce new scripts for “Friends”.
The Infinite Friends Machine was developed by Tom Armitage in 2014 and working on a similar basis to Herd, is also able to generate original scripts.
So till the time we get some new episodes or a movie, you can soothe your friends-episodes-aching hearts with these artificially made up scripts.
