Humor writer Keaton Patti, who previously posted a commercial ostensibly written by AI after watching hours of Olive Garden commercials, has returned to the fray — this time sharing a page of screenplay he says was created by a bot after watching 1,000 hours of Hallmark movies.
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And, as in the past, a lot of news sources are running with the news pretty uncritically — including sources like NBC 4 in Columbus.
After his Olive Garden story — which remains his pinned tweet, six months later — went viral, an AI expert dissected it on Twitter, revealing a number of “tells” that suggested it was almost certainly authored by a human to approximate something a bot might spit out.
That did not take away from the fun of the original, and it won’t take away from the fun of this one. While, to our knowledge, Patti has never acknowledged that he is the author of the pieces and not a program, this new one appears to address some of the critiques of the first, in part by shortening the “attention span” of the bot and introducing more seemingly random elements.
The result is a dark and vexing “twist” in this Hallmark Christmas story.
That twist, along with several funny turns-of-phrase that feel legitimately oddball enough to have been created by a bot, not only give the story credibility but have filled the comments thread beneath his tweet with responses that make it clear some of the lines in this story will be memed throughout the rest of the holiday season and beyond.
I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Hallmark Christmas movies and then asked it to write a Hallmark Christmas movie of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/HMEtkzHVCi
— Keaton Patti (@KeatonPatti) December 12, 2018
It is unlikely that 1,000 hours of Hallmark Christmas movies even exist; while the TV network has been prolific in creating movies for the holiday — especially over the last few years — a 2017 report counted 136 total Hallmark Christmas movies. That means for there to be 1,000 hours of content, each movie would have to be something like 6 or 7 hours long. That’s a lot of Dean Cain for anybody.
So far, while Patti has offered to help Hallmark develop his script, there has been no official response from the network.
