With every fan of Friends likely to know almost every line off by heart at this stage, and with little chance of a real Friends reunion ever taking place, one bored man programmed a bot to create a whole new set of scripts for the show.
And before you jump down this journalist’s throat, I am aware there is a Friends reunion of sorts happening for an upcoming one-off documentary, but I’m talking about a real Friends reunion were all the gang would return for 30 minutes of sitcom glory each week.
But if they are to return to the small screen one day – or even the big screen – they could possibly use the scripts written by a bot programmed by comic artist Paddyland, otherwise known as Andy Herd.
i fed a recurrent neural network with the scripts for every episode of friends and it learned to generate new scenes pic.twitter.com/RIPvYuzEJM
— Andy Pandy (@_Pandy) January 18, 2016
Explaining his concept to The Washington Post, Herd said that, in a fit of boredom, he created an artificial intelligence program that would take all of the text from every single Friends episode and then figure out how to make coherent sentences from it.
“I was motivated by childlike fascination at the possibilities of machine learning and how it could be applied to humour,” Herd said to the newspaper in an email. “I think the scripts are actually better than some current TV sitcoms. I have received a lot of positive feedback.”
You have to credit Herd with thinking of particularly novel means of trying to get over your Friends withdrawal, but is this script actually any use?
I’ll let you be the judge, based off one of the excerpts posted by Andy.
Chandler: Well, I proposed to my shoe …
Joey: (laughs) This is his father … (cave children) Hey, Pheebs?
Monica: I hate men! I hate men!
Ross: What are you gonna do?
(All the dinner enters)
Monica: Happy Gandalf.
Could it be any more terrible?
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Friends memorabilia image via Leonard Zhukovsky/Shutterstock
