AI centre stage in weird and wonderful take on Festival Fringe
ImprovBot will be creating show descriptions every hour from the August 7-31 for this years virtual Edinburgh Festival Fringe since its creation in 1948.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh used artificial intelligence to analyse a digital archive of fringe listings to create a series of mind-bending online spectacles.
In partnership with the Festival Fringe, researchers mined eight years’ worth of data from Fringe programmes.
The researchers instructed the ImprovBot to repetitively mine the 100-word text descriptions of every show from 2011 to 2019, amounting to more than two million words.
Online audiences will be allowed to interact with ImprovBot on Twitter that created the new shows based on previous fringe listings from 1pm on Friday, August 7.
The bot will use this data to devise the world’s first AI-generated event blurbs for an imagined festival of comedy, plays, musicals, and cabaret.
It will come up with more than 350 show descriptions – ranging from the bizarre to the hilarious.
The researchers programmed ImprovBot to invent the shows using an Artificial Intellgence technique that trains a neural network to recognise patterns in text until they can construct their own descriptions.
See the full story here: http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2020/08/03/ai-centre-stage-in-weird-and-wonderful-take-on-festival-fringe/