About: The Team | How the AI Works | Rules of Curation | Acknowledgements and Disclaimers | Press and Coverage
Not everything The Bot generates is worth reading. Its obsessions can be illuminating; think twice before describing your show as “unmissable comedy” because there is apparently a lot of that around. But our human audience are busy people and like any Fringe production, we have a responsibility to respect their time and entertain them.
So we have a process of curation to present you the best material from The Bot’s output. These are our self-imposed curatorial rules:
- No additional text. Every show description you read is directly generated by The Bot.
- Leave the weird words in. The Bot’s spelling is good, but it occasionally invents neologisms. Please enjoy them.
- No messing with the title. If we use the show, we use the entire title as generated.
- No crossing show boundaries. Because its entire experience of language is based on 100-word show descriptions, The Bot outputs a similar format. However, like any writer, it sometimes blows the word count. We decided it was OK to remove material from a show blurb to reduce it to the correct size (100-word description or 280-character tweet) but it was not OK to combine fragments from different show blurbs.
- No breaking sentences. The Bot writes in complete sentences but, like creative writing students, it makes some of them way too long. We decided that it was OK to delete entire sentences, but it was not OK to edit their contents in any way.
- Everybody enjoys a paragraph break. We decided it was OK to use human-inserted paragraph breaks to make the website show descriptions more readable.
Example
Here is an original piece of text generated by The Bot:
The Offering Theatre
A show about the story of a young woman to research with a secret radio play. The School production are going to find their same city to interconnected in a fast-paced tale of the art of consequences. A comedy for a life of family and hard words. Will he find the audience between the suspects of a generation of emotions and staged in a dark comedy from Le Charley (New York Comedy, The Browning Theatre and The End of Entertainment). ‘Wonderful’ **** (EdinburghGuide.com).
This has an evocative title, a strong concept (a secret radio play!) and some lovely expression: “a fast-paced tale of the art of consequences”. But like most generated shows, its text is a little too long.
We have two formats: a show description for the website (100 words max, not counting the title) or a 280-character tweet. We need a lot more tweets. So I make this edit, reducing the description to about 260 characters:
The Offering Theatre
A show about the story of a young woman to research with a secret radio play. The School production are going to find their same city to interconnected in a fast-paced tale of the art of consequences.
A comedy for a life of family and hard words. Will he find the audience between the suspects of a generation of emotions and staged in a dark comedy from Le Charley (New York Comedy, The Browning Theatre and The End of Entertainment).‘Wonderful’ **** (EdinburghGuide.com).
Often a promising show has to be rejected because one sentence is so long it simply cannot fit within the limits imposed by a show description or a tweet.
improvbot.ai 