Infinite Friends Machine - A Bot That Writes Sitcoms

Here to demonstrate that even a robot could have written scripts for the sitcom Friends is the Infinite Friends Machine, a bot programmed to write an episode of Friends and may be credited as the creator of a sequel series called Frenemies. Okay, that last bit may not be true, but the fact that a bot and a bit of coding is all it takes to write your average sitcom isn’t really earth shattering news.

 Creator of IFM Tom Armitage explains how he used a program called Plotagon to create the strangest episode of Friends ever made:

The machines does a few simple things. First, it scrapes Friends transcripts. For now, it works for most of Series 1. It then parses those scripts and chops them up into episodes, scenes, and lines attributed to individual characters. It also strips out some directions. Then, using all that, it offers ways to generate new scripts.

Is this the future of televised entertainment, with rooms full of sketch writers being replaced with server racks and script writing code? I certainly hope not...

-Via Gawker