There’s a brand new Harry Potter book and not only is it absolutely ridiculous, it’s been written by trained bots.
The book, titled Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, is the work of a Botnik Studios bot which generated the book entirely with predictive keyboards.
Botnik is a community of writers, artists and developers ‘collaborating with machines to create strange new things’ – and they’ve certainly succeeded here.
Posting pictures of pages from the book’s chapter ‘The Handsome One’, we’ve been presented with great lines such as: ‘Ron’s Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.’
Tweeting about it, Botnik Studios wrote:
We used predictive keyboards trained on all seven books to ghostwrite this spellbinding new Harry Potter chapter.
Other lines in the chapter include:
Leathery sheets of rain lashed at Harry’s ghost as he walked across the grounds towards the castle. Ron was standing there and doing a kind of frenzied tap dance. He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.
Then there’s this:
‘Death Eaters are on top of the castle!’ Ron bleated, quivering. Ron was going to be spiders. He just was.
This:
The pig of Hufflepuff pulsed like a large bullfrog. Dumbledore smiled at it, and placed his hand on its head: ‘You are Hagrid now.’
And not forgetting:
‘Locked,’ said Mr. Staircase, the shabby-robed ghost. They looked at the door, screaming about how closed it was and asking it to be replaced with a small orb.
The password was ‘BEEF WOMEN,’ Hermione cried.
The tweet has been liked almost 62,000 times and retweeted more than 29,000 times, (at the tie of writing), with people commenting to say how funny they thought it was.
Erik Hjorth wrote:
I laughed so hard that I almost dropped my phone. The part about Harry throwing his eyes into the forest was comedy gold.
Imogen Pruthi said:
To be fair some of it could have been in the real books like ‘Voldemort you’re a very bad and mean wizard’ Harry savagely said.
Hermione nodded encouragingly. Like that could definitely be part of a previously on Harry Potter sequence.
Nat Towson, a writer and editor at Botnik cleared up some of the comments, tweeting:
It’s not automated! We have a team of writers who all use the Botnik predictive text keyboard.
We trained keyboards on all seven books and had a big writing jam.
Then I took the best pieces of copy, arranged them into a narrative, and wrote some copy to fill in the gaps.
When asked what J.K. Rowling would make of it all, Mr Towson sent a screen grab of a ‘like’ by the Harry Potter author herself:
Now come on and publish the whole book, we want more.
