You're a quack smudge on these lockers called life
October 20, 2017 6:23 AM   Subscribe

 
A lot of married couples have to go to the cemetery to have sex. It's not a big deal.
The thing I always loved about that show was how relevant it was to my experience, despite the fact that I am not a doctor or nurse.
posted by middleclasstool at 6:29 AM on October 20, 2017 [12 favorites]


"You are the mean me janitor. You got all the John Dorian potential with none of the flowers and dead dog."

SO REAL
posted by solotoro at 6:36 AM on October 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


This is perfection.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:40 AM on October 20, 2017


WHO IS THE OTHER J.D.; NOT THE ONE THAT MATTERS?!
posted by chavenet at 6:41 AM on October 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


Amazingly not totally incoherent.

Be scared creative types! This shit is starting to write itself!
posted by Nanukthedog at 6:59 AM on October 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


This had to have been heavily edited.
posted by domo at 7:03 AM on October 20, 2017 [12 favorites]


Yeah, several sentences throw back to the one before, stage direction has the characters doing the things they've just mentioned, etc etc. This was not written by a predictive keyboard.
posted by Dysk at 7:06 AM on October 20, 2017 [8 favorites]


How do you train a predictive keyboard? I would love to know this.
posted by mittens at 7:12 AM on October 20, 2017


It's controversial, some people still insist on using physical force and even electrical shocks, but many others have moved on to purely praise and positive reinforcement strategies.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:23 AM on October 20, 2017 [22 favorites]


This was not written by a predictive keyboard.

Needs more mouse bites.
posted by gauche at 7:25 AM on October 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


i bet the dialogue came from predictive keyboards, then they were arranged in a sequence that made something of a script, with the stage direction written by hand. Just my guess.
posted by rebent at 7:32 AM on October 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


Some more info on the creator! He's the former head writer at ClickHole.
posted by Donald Trump Sex Nightmare at 7:34 AM on October 20, 2017


"With this feature I have developed, it expands the options to nine or 15 words that are plausible next steps in the sentence."

Human hands were all over this. This is not what "written by a predictive keyboard" means.
posted by Dysk at 7:41 AM on October 20, 2017


I'm in the skeptical humbug crowd. This reads like good absurdism, and lacks all the predictable incoherence and disconjunction of machine-generated product. Whether it's a case where it's isolated machine-generated bits cobbled into a more coherent form, or just goofy writing with a deadpan AI-baiting spin, I dunno, and I'd be curious to hear if there *is* something complicated going on.

But at a guess I'd just say it's just deadpan spin: someone wrote something in a sort of, yeah, Clickhole-ian "oral history of" tone, threw a "predictive text" spin on the delivery as a bit of a jokey gimmick, and then that gimmick is getting in the way of the joke because the writing is funnier taken as deliberate oddball parody without the "wait, generated how, exactly?" distraction.

Then again maybe in their heart of hearts the writer was going for the meta-prank of making-people-discuss-machine-generation but I feel like that's a big reach to premise absurdist Scrubs satire around if you're not gonna at least work in a bit with JD and Turk riffing on Skynet or the Butlerian Jihad.
posted by cortex at 7:45 AM on October 20, 2017 [8 favorites]


TIMING
posted by cortex at 7:46 AM on October 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


How Predictive Keyboards Work (and How You Can Train Yours Better) (Lifehacker, 2014)
In its most basic form, keyboard prediction uses text that you enter over time to build a custom, local "dictionary" of words and phrases that you've typed repeatedly. It then "scores" those words by the probability you'll use or need it again. For example, if you type in "lifehacker" and your keyboard has never seen you use it before, it'll offer to correct it to another phrase that it thinks is more likely (no, I don’t mean “lifejacket”). You have three options: You can accept one of their corrections, you can ignore the word and leave it as is, or you can add it to your personal dictionary so it won't bother you when you type it again.
...
You can read more about the way predictive keyboards work in detail in this thread at Stack Exchange, which references the specific text in Apple's two patents (US Patent No. 8,232,973 and 8,074,172.
And here's Joe Braidwood, Chief Marketing Officer for SwiftKey:
The single thing that unites these products is the fact that they attempt to predict words. This is pretty much where the comparisons end. Predictions can be simple, such as in older keyboards with Nuance’s T9. This is really about disambiguation—based on the keys that have been tapped, what words could be intended? They tend to use lists or dictionaries of words and are most famously what people refer to when they say “predictive text”.

Other more advanced predictive keyboards use a different approach to prediction that is based on natural language processing (specifically, probabilistic language modeling) and machine learning. The language modeling is what gives the predictive keyboard context—i.e. what lets it know how certain words tend to be combined together in language. As such, the accuracy of such keyboards tends to be far greater than older disambiguation keyboards. Add to that machine learning—what allows the keyboard to adapt continually in a smart way—and you have a typing experience that doesn’t stand still, but that tailors itself to a user. This is what makes those “damn you autocorrect” moments less likely, as if the keyboard gets it wrong once, it’s less likely to repeat the offending prediction.
...
Several predictive keyboards also offer cloud-based services which can involve a variety of features. Some of the more common features include: injecting contact names from online services into predictions, analyzing your writing on various online services to update and thereby personalize word predictions, storage and sync of your language model/predictions so they may be used on multiple devices and not lost if a device breaks or is stolen, and dynamic updating of your language model based on other language information crowd-sourced from real-time sites e.g. Twitter.
And you can add dictionaries to expand or refine the next words a keyboard would suggest, so it's possible to feed scripts into a predictive keyboard app without copying chunks of script as texts to someone, though someone could theoretically copy whole episode scripts in as individual texts or messages written via a predictive keyboard, if you used the app in a way that would accept a ton of text at once. After all, there are only 182 episodes, so it wouldn't that long to copy + paste 182 times.

In short: this might not be as far-fetched as it seems.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:03 AM on October 20, 2017


Which, yeah, what Dysk said. I'm sort of annoyed at the framing of it because I actually really like that scheme as a creative writing project/tool; the dada free-associative aspect of working within constraints is an appealing and worthwhile thing to chase down!

It just...isn't machine-generated in the sense that folks use that phrase. It's like saying a painting was machine generated because you used a random number generator to choose the colors and then make all the brushwork decisions yourself. There's some tool mediation in there, sure, and I find that totally interesting, but if you sell that as "my computer painted this" you're not really communicating your process very clearly.
posted by cortex at 8:03 AM on October 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


what if the first draft was all predictive text and then edited for consistency and style by a Real Scamp

isn't that how all celebrity autobiographies work anyway which we all accept at face value because we live in a machine-processed, fabricated world where we don't even know where the raw materials that make up our life originated from, whose hands, bloodied and oppressed by global markets, have touched that smartphone or coffee mug or comfortable fleece-lined pajamas
posted by runt at 8:09 AM on October 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


I liked the way that everyone was extremely in character, even if their actions and words were mostly nonsense. (Also things being mostly nonsense is also extremely in character.)

Just sad Ted didn't make an appearance.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 8:13 AM on October 20, 2017


what if the first draft was all predictive text and then edited for consistency and style by a Real Scamp

We know it wasn't, though. Donald Trump Sex Nightmare's comment contains a link that explains a process and toolset that is absolutely not a predictive keyboard.
posted by Dysk at 8:20 AM on October 20, 2017


The smoking gun for "this is fake" is on page three, near the bottom:

The camera zooms in on Dr. Kelso, who dabs.

Dabbing was not a trend when Scrubs was on the air, and would not be in the Scrubs corpus to be drawn into this.

That said, let's stop dissecting the damn thing and enjoy it for what it is.
posted by explosion at 8:22 AM on October 20, 2017 [6 favorites]


My predictive keyboard gets befuddled on suggestions when I'm a single keyboard letter away in an otherwise perfectly spelled word, so yeah we're probably not there yet.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:24 AM on October 20, 2017


Dabbing was not a trend when Scrubs was on the air, and would not be in the Scrubs corpus to be drawn into this.

Ah, but it's a show where many of the characters might, in a moment of either joking or genuine emotional reaction, dab at an eye with a kleenex! JD dabs his eye probably once every four episodes. So it being in the available vocab as a selection scans with the author's described methods. But choosing to redeploy it in a different implied context is all human sensibility.
posted by cortex at 8:34 AM on October 20, 2017 [6 favorites]


I dumped 10,000 plates of beans into my computer's CD-ROM drive and it immediately bought itself a MetaFilter account.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:55 AM on October 20, 2017 [11 favorites]


I am going to go to the movie tonight and see if I can get it to work on the real border and I will be back in the office at the end of the day was walking to the airport and I was thinking of you and hope you had a good time at the party and I hope you have a great day and I will see you soon.
posted by ODiV at 9:16 AM on October 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


Mark my words: we're going to see the cast reunite to cover this in a podcast or online-only sort of format.

But surely they're all too busy with ... um ...

Yeah, probably.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:39 AM on October 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


Human hands were all over this. This is not what "written by a predictive keyboard" means.

Oh! Well. I guess I will just take all this joy I got from reading it and bring it back to the store for a refund!

It's a FAAAAAAAAKE!!
posted by danny the boy at 9:42 AM on October 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


I mean, the framing is kinda bullshitty, is all? I'm torn between my stated annoyance above about that and enjoying it as a bit of weirdness; I think it's some totally enjoyable weirdness that is 100% fine to like. Keep your joy! Your joy is permitted! The thing bringing you joy was just sort of poorly described in ways that generative language nerds are chafin' at a bit, is all.
posted by cortex at 9:56 AM on October 20, 2017


Yeah, it reads like a human wrote something silly. There's not really nonsense, just non sequiturs.

I wonder if maybe it was a half AI approach, like "I'll type in half a sentence, and let the keyboard finish, and use that as a prompt for the beginning of the next sentence."

With a predictive text keyboard, characters would be popping in and out without formal introductions. And I think it's very strange to call predictive text "an average BLANK." Not because it's wrong, but more because I have no idea how that would work with text generation. It's just not an adjective that makes sense.
posted by ikea_femme at 10:39 AM on October 20, 2017


If Clickhole said it was a script for a reunion episode Zack Braff rejected, I would have loved this just as much. It's funny, but dishonest.
posted by ikea_femme at 10:40 AM on October 20, 2017


"I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can make sure I have the right to be mad at me for not being able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can make sure I have the right to be a woman who is this and what is the address of the house and the other is a good time to come by and see you soon from the subway station and I don't want to be a part of the team."

Okay, my keyboard definitely has the wall of text badly punctuated run-on sentence punk zine aesthetic.
posted by ikea_femme at 10:44 AM on October 20, 2017


Nowhere near enough musical montages.
posted by Sphinx at 11:00 AM on October 20, 2017


This thread to comedy robot
posted by ikea_femme at 11:39 AM on October 20, 2017


Is there any way to read these on a computer screen? Chrome, Windows 7. The text is extremely small and there is no "open image in new tab" option besides the first image. Magnifying the screen does not make it large enough.
posted by AFABulous at 12:34 PM on October 20, 2017


AFABulous, there's also a version on the botnik site, here, may behave better if twitters giving you trouble.
posted by cortex at 12:56 PM on October 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


Ich bin mir sicher noch nicht in die Fänge ich bin mir sicher das ist nicht so gut bei dir aus der Altstadt und und und und die U4 bin mal schauen ob es ein bisschen hab dich nur noch ein bisschen was von der Oma jetzt noch ein bisschen hab dich nur noch die Fotos sind schon gut eingelebt in die Fänge ich habe noch ein bisschen was zu tun haben wir noch nicht so richtig gut bei euch Kurse und die U4 bin ich immer noch nicht
posted by Skybly at 1:37 PM on October 20, 2017


Errr, sorry. That should teach me not to use the comment field for experimenting!
posted by Skybly at 1:38 PM on October 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


Oh! Well. I guess I will just take all this joy I got from reading it and bring it back to the store for a refund!

That's a hell of a thing to read into what I said. I said it wasn't what it claimed to be. I never said it wasn't funny, I never said anyone was wrong to enjoy it, but thanks for putting those words in my mouth, I guess.
posted by Dysk at 3:58 PM on October 20, 2017


I believe we've had the argument about this before, and it's not predictive in the sense of "they've let a markov chain run" but predictive in the sense of "the next word is restricted to a small probabilistic selection". The computer finds unexpected connections which the human selects.

You can see on Objectdreams' tumblr that various authors are credited. There would be no authors if it was generative text, rather than a generative writing -tool-.

I wish they would make this a bit clearer because the results are consistently sublime in a way neither pure generation or pure human writing can match easily. There's no reason to give the computer all the agency when a collaborative effort is just as enjoyable.
posted by solarion at 4:36 PM on October 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


I definitely read the predictive keyboard bit as a joke framing-device.
posted by Emily's Fist at 5:38 PM on October 20, 2017


I think "predictive keyboard" is a perfectly accurate description of how these are written. You know how most smartphone keyboards offer suggestions for the next word you might want to type? But you still make all the choices yourself? That's a predictive keyboard, and that's exactly how the Botnik folks write these pieces.

(Hmm... imagine if you could make your regular phone keyboard offer suggestions based entirely on the works of Jane Austen, or Jay-Z, or David Foster Wallace...)

Anyway, Botnik is so open about this that you can use their keyboard software on their web site with their predictive models, or you can train your own by uploading source material. Some of the code is on GitHub too.

previously, previously

(This recipe is still my favorite though.)
posted by mbrubeck at 8:41 PM on October 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


To expand on their methods a bit, for their Scrubs and Seinfeld screenplays, they use several predictive text models: one for each character and one for stage directions. Then different contributors write the lines for the different characters, each using a different predictive keyboard model. The apps.botnik.org page has the models for the Seinfeld scripts so you can try your own hand, and the blog has some of their output.

Note that the tweet never said a computer wrote the episode. It said that "we" trained keyboards and wrote the episode. And the next three tweets said exactly who the writers and editor were.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:55 PM on October 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


my new reframing is that this is the output of a new turn-based tactical writing game where the player is required to choose their next move from a limited supply of word-cards drawn from a constantly probabilistically re-skewed deck
posted by cortex at 8:16 AM on October 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


Botnik.org has more, and I want to link to them all, but I'll stop with two:

- "I believe in Crystal Light 'cause I believe in me!" Stick your sup spoon up your nose and exclaim, "no comment!" because you're the best. With vitamin C in a perfect world, your skin will feel like teeth! That's the beauty of Crystal Light.

- Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) Your home looks a bit drab. You might want to leave. Just go. You could easily overcome this, but you should go.

OK, one more: I am a little bit nervous to meet his limbs. He has so many! - Emily


Wired has a write-up on Botnik:
the Botnik team spent this past year building and fine-tuning several corpuses—essentially large language databases, each one culling from a specific pop-cultural genre or entity, like beauty ads, or *Savage Love* columns. Those terms populate the site's individual keyboards, which allow you to craft sentences—each word dictating your options for the next—and ultimately your own weirdo missives.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:03 PM on October 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


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