First they came for the assembly line. Then they wanted to drive our cars. They're now integrated into every smartphone and app. Still, there were a few remaining spheres of humanity walled off to automation, like art, music, and comedy — until now.Botnik is a Seattle-based writing collective that uses artificial intelligence and other machine learning techniques to write funny stuff. Basically, it’s a group of humans that collaborates with various bots to make stuff that probably wouldn’t get made otherwise, like computer-generated Netflix rom-coms, Oscar ballots and new Harry Potter books.Now they're turning their attention to music with the release of "The Songularity," an album of songs written with Voicebox, a predictive text algorithm that suggests words in the style of any source text you feed into it.The first single is called “Bored With This Desire to Get Ripped,” which is a Smiths-esque jam, set to lyrics based on the entire oeuvre of Morrissey — and all the Amazon customer reviews of the P90x workout DVDs.To promote the album — and Kickstarter campaign behind it, which has been funded — the group traveled to New York for a working jam session and live show."I hope to show people that writing in this playful way with machines can be a really good experience," Botnik CEO Jamie Brew told VICE News. "You don't always have to assume the machine is there to help you be more efficient or write things faster. There's a whole world of playful purposeless machines that do nothing of business value but are just fun."The crowd in NYC, made up entirely of humans, seemed to agree.This segment originally aired October 11, 2018 on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
Advertisement