Presented by Timothy Beal, Florence Harkness Professor of Religion, with Michael Hemenway, AI Institute, Iliff School of Theology
See Beal and Hemenway's Presentation
Abstract: In this session you will learn how to build a text bot in the coding language of Python. We will first make one that autogenerates its own verses based on the King James Version Bible. You can then take it home and experiment with other textual corpuses (see, e.g., twitter.com/emilymarkovson which uses the program to write and tweet four-line poems based on the complete works of Emily Dickinson). As fun as it is to play with, this program also provokes questions and issues about writing, probability, and what we might call “artificial creativity.” Click here for the Google Colab Notebook mentioned in this talk.