BY DARIUS KAZEMI

I created @TwoHeadlines because of an email Adam Parrish sent me. Here is the thread reproduced in its entirety, with his permission:



Adam Parrish - Aug 23, 12:08 pm

Did you hear the news? Ben Affleck is the new CEO of Microsoft! — Ian Bogost (@ibogost) August 23, 2013

^^^^ surely there must be a way to automate this kind of joke. the solution probably can’t be purely lexical—I think you’d need to have some kind of semantic information about the people involved and the event that just happened. but it can’t be THAT hard, right?

Darius Kazemi - Aug 23, 12:21 pm

I mean, I imagine you could just take the top 5 newspaper headlines and join them together by some kind of process, maybe markov-based or n-grams or something.

Darius Kazemi - Aug 23, 12:23 pm

If you go to news.google.com, you see this sidebar:

Top Stories

NASDAQ

Batman

Steve Ballmer

Damascus

Mumbai

Bo Xilai

The World’s End

iPhone 5

Nidal Malik Hasan

Justin Timberlake

Then click on one of them, like “Batman” and get the top headline:

The Guardian

Ben Affleck to play Batman in next Superman movie

Then replace “Batman” with one of the other words in the sidebar:

The Guardian

Ben Affleck to play iPhone 5 in next Superman movie

Adam Parrish - Aug 23, 12:26 pm

hmmm. yeah, that’s not bad. arguably, though, you’re generating weird headlines and not, like, jokes about current events.



At the time I thought Adam was wrong: of course @TwoHeadlines is telling jokes about current events! The corpus that it’s pulling from (news headlines) is nothing but current events!

Two months later and @TwoHeadlines is my most popular Twitter bot. I think it’s my funniest to date. Some representative tweets:

Wes Anderson’s human rights violations continue with increase in public executions

Pentagon proposes USD 10.8 billion arms deal with NBC, UAE

‘Elon Musk’ returns, with more blood, revenge and a feisty makeover

Those cool United States Congress features? Android does that, too

Chipotle Mexican Grill is facing a new Islamist insurgency

Facebook, world powers report progress in nuclear talks, agree to further meetings

Then a few days ago, I saw this tweet:

Every funny tweet from @TwoHeadlines has been a magical realist Late Capitalist dystopia full of private armies and corporate states. — Bones Demon-eyes (@BMunise) October 19, 2013

I did not set out to write a bot that writes near-future late-capitalist dystopian microfiction. I set out to write a bot that automates a particular kind of joke. But if we pause to consider the bot’s algorithm, it’s obvious where this tendency toward a very specific fiction genre originates.

The Google News sidebar described in the email thread above is Google’s attempt to parse out the subject of a bunch of related news headlines. For example, if there is a bombing in Iraq and there are a lot of news headlines about it, it will probably generate the subject “Iraq.” This is a very specific choice: it could have equally chosen “bombing” or “terrorism” or “chaos”, but Google’s algorithm tends to favor named entities over abstract concepts. What this means is that the subject of the news, as Google sees it, is almost always a corporation, a sports team, a celebrity, a nation, or a brand.

My algorithm builds its jokes by harvesting these subjects that Google has picked, and swapping them indiscriminately between headlines.

What is near-future late-capitalist dystopian fiction but a world where there is no discernible difference between corporations, nations, sports teams, brands, and celebrities?

So Adam was partly right in our original email thread. @TwoHeadlines is not generating jokes about current events. It is generating jokes about the future: a very specific future dictated by what a Google algorithm believes is important about humans and our affairs.