ImprovBot: Edinburgh Festival, Generated. 7-31 Aug 2020
CDCS Director Prof. Melissa Terras and colleagues have created a bot that will generate event blurbs using AI technology, creating an imagined Festival Fringe programme and inspiring improvised sketches that will be shared online throughout August.
In 2020, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (as we know it) will not go ahead for the first time since 1947. Professor Terras, fellow researchers, and the Improverts – the Fringe’s longest running improv comedy group – have responded to the situation by planning to provide festival entertainment via Twitter from Friday 7th August.
In partnership with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, researchers mined two million words of textual data from eight years’ worth of Fringe programmes. ImprovBot was programmed by Gavin Inglis and Rudolf Ammann, utilising AI technology to train a neural network to recognise patterns in text, until the bot can construct its own descriptions. The bot will come up with more than 350 show descriptions, which The Improverts will use as prompts to invent a virtual arts festival of comedy, plays, musicals, and cabaret, shared via Twitter.
Professor Terras commented on the importance of enabling digital engagement with ImprovBot:
The aim of ImprovBot is to explore the junction of human creativity and comedy, and to see how this is affected when an Artificial Intelligence enters into the mix. It is reminder of the playfulness of the Fringe and we invite online audiences to rise to the provocation, and interact, remix, mashup, and play with the content.
Improvbot.ai will be active from 13:00 Friday 7 August, until 19:00 Monday 31 August.