It's true that hardly anyone can write like J.K. Rowling, the woman who penned the Harry Potter franchise into existence. However, a computer certainly tried — and didn't exactly fail at writing the next great chapter of the wizarding world.
Botnik Studios, whose website states is "a community of writers, artists and developers collaborating with machines to create strange new things," decided to train a predictive keyboard on all seven Harry Potter novels. With its new Hogwarts knowledge, the keyboard was able to write out what very closely resembles a real chapter within Rowling's book series — albeit one that operates via dream logic.
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The chapter comes from the entirely made-up novel, which Botnik's keyboard bot titled Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Very Large Pile of Ash. (Botnik even designed a cover in which Harry is seen in front of a painting of said pile.)
It is the most amazing thing that has ever happened, honestly.
We used predictive keyboards trained on all seven books to ghostwrite this spellbinding new Harry Potter chapter https://t.co/UaC6rMlqTy pic.twitter.com/VyxZwMYVVy
— Botnik Studios (@botnikstudios) December 12, 2017
The book features such gems as:
"The sky outside was a great black ceiling, which was full of blood."
"Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself."
"He saw Harry and began to immediately eat Hermione's family."
"Ron was going to be spiders. He just was. He wasn't proud of that, but it was going to be hard to not have spiders all over his body after all is said and done."
"The password is 'BEEF WOMAN,' Hermione cried."
"'We're the only people who matter. He's never going to get rid of us,' Harry, Hermione, and Ron said in chorus."
The funny thing is, all of these sentences are just close enough to Harry Potter's actual text that this chapter feels oddly familiar, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure Dumbledore never told the pig of Hufflepuff that it would be Hagrid now, as occurs in HPATPOWLLAVLPOA.
This isn't the first time predictive text created something just-this-side of the original. Former Clickhole writer Jamie Brew created a Seinfeld script using a similar strategy.
Maybe Amazon should open an entire e-book section strictly for predictive works: They might not make any sense, but they're pretty entertaining anyway.