New Friends episodes are being written by a randomly generating robot
Creating such classic lines as, "Seriously give me a clown on the table that's all."
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Rejoice! New Friends episodes now exist in the world. Only thing is: they've been randomly generated by a computer, all thanks to the functions of a recurrent neural network.
Webcomic artist Andy Herd (AKA Andy Pandy, creator of Pandyland) created the new episodes by feeding every single Friends script into the network, which is capable of both learning and processing sequences.
"It works by predicting the next letter to follow a given sequence of letters, and the predictions are determined by what it learned about language from the Friends dialogue provided," Herd told The Daily Beast. "It can generate stuff within minutes, but it’s barely English. A lot of it is still nonsense." Magical nonsense like this:
[Scene: Chandler and Joey's. Joey is waiting for the door. Ross is looking for Joey and Chandler's stuck on the couch and screaming.]
Chandler: Well, I proposed to my shoe...
Herd confesses he isn't much of an expert with the underlying processes here; utilising a now open sourced Google creation TensorFlow. "I’ve been reading up about machine learning in my spare time lately because it’s really fascinating. I honestly don’t understand a lot of the underlying mathematics, but I’m trying!" he continued. "Also, Satan helped a bit."
When asked what he may attempt next, Herd responded: "Maybe Frasier or Seinfeld. Or maybe mash them all together and create The Perfect Sitcom."
It's apt timing ahead of the much-touted Friends semi-reunion happening as part of a tribute to director James Burrows. Maybe they'll just save themselves a buck and use one of Herd's scripts?
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments