If there is a universe that has been expanded and fueled by fanfiction, it's the Harry Potter saga. The adventures of Harry, Ron, and Hermione officially concluded with the seventh novel (unless you count The Cursed Child as another release), but their loyal followers won't let pens and keyboards rest. The folks at Botnik Studios decided to add one more writer to that effort: an artificial intelligence trained on the text of all seven books so it could write its own chapter. The title is "Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash", and that already tells us everything.
Seven novels, their corresponding adaptations, a play, parallel texts, a prequel, a new movie, and its sequel scheduled for next year. Harry Potter fans have their hands full, and when they don't, all they have to do is sit at a keyboard and start writing. Today we won't debate the legality of fanfiction (basically, it depends on what each jurisdiction has established through its copyright laws), but instead we'll focus on a very particular piece. What's so special about it? Only one thing: it was written by an artificial intelligence.
"Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash" is a creation of the bot trained by the people at Botnik Studios, assisted by a group of writers who gave the final text a more polished form. In part, this was necessary because the bot only had predictive keyboards with the text of the seven novels as its source, so it should be seen as a kind of collaboration between humans and artificial intelligences.
The result is a small four-page entry called "The Handsome One" that makes no sense, but somehow retains a certain air of legitimacy — as long as we set aside Ron devouring Hermione's family, and Harry tearing out his own eyes to throw them into the forest (yes, that specific). Oh, Harry also dipped Hermione in hot sauce, a pig took over Hagrid's role, and Harry fell down the spiral staircase for the rest of the summer. You can't afford to miss this.
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