
The photograph showed over 520 illicit firearms that were collected in Kenya near Nairobi.Īt the time, the experience of using the tool was both under- and overwhelming, but I still think about that pairing of church and firearms.

One of the pairings I selected was a painting by Dennis Creffield from 1987 titled “ Canterbury Cathedral.” In response, Recognition suggested a photograph taken on Novemby Thomas Mukoya, a photojournalist. When the system was right, it felt incredibly right, and almost magical. The joy I get out of this bot is similar to the joy of watching a child learn jokes, because the bot’s outputs are so nonsensical and unexpected.

The bot uses so many different combinations that I would never think to try. The meme’s structure lends itself perfectly for a joke bot to fill in the most unexpected and hilarious word associations within the meme’s framework, akin to a bot-like Mad Libs, automating and generating jokes every four hours. Roof Slapping Bot takes the roof-slapping meme (one of my favorites) and turns it into an automatic meme-joke generator. With words already associated and mapped together, a joke bot just has to fill the word associations into the joke structure.

For example: As an entity, weather has related associations with words and descriptors like cold, hot, snow, flooding, a cold front, etc. There are different kinds of code libraries and word libraries a bot creator can use to map related words together, such as word2vec. Similar to how we diagram and break apart sentences to see their structure, knowing that there is a fixed structure to a joke allows for bots to fill in the blanks.
