Hooookay. That first attempt to have Artificial Intelligence write our press release didn’t work so great. The part that was just the letter “Z” repeated hundreds of times should have been a giveaway. Our bad. Let’s try it again. We fed a headline into the serious, totes for reals, AI fake news-generating program GROVER, from the Paul Allen Institute of AI, and here’s what we got:

Lazy, Lazy Comedy Group Uses Artificial Intelligence to Write Latest Press Release

December 1, 2019 – The Van Gogh-Goghs

If you think tech comes from spaceships and things you can’t understand, be pleasantly surprised. The young group of Danish creatives at Lazy Geeks puts out press releases that sound like the pitches to space-aged, go-to marketers and global ad agencies. Now a light-hearted post on Facebook shows what bots can do if you pay the price.

This current-issue Google Doodle marks the bicentennial of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. A whole game of mystery lies ahead, as I have no idea how it fits into the Google Doodle history, or who is doing the work. Turns out, it’s somebody not working for Google, making the soundboard. This robot had the time and the capital to explore and write this piece, which is a first for me.

Inferring that it’s super cultured, bored, and a bit of a cad, the Google Doodle bot goes at it like a bad-boy librarian:

We’ve always done good on the number of new Dutch masterpieces we’ve named but we didn’t see it coming. Can you guess who we’re bringing back with us? The Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. Today he’s on Google Doodles but it’s worth nothing that he didn’t just paint all of them. His studio kept the old masters around too and artists like van Gogh and Rembrandt. When you Google Gerrit the story says that he never did anything to improve the quality of the paintings… Oh, don’t worry, that’s not true. Your pleasure!

Oh, did I mention the automation? Using no longer-forgotten botology and algorithms, Lazy Geeks has begun developing an artificial intelligence style guide (AKA style graph), that quickly synthesizes sententious (mostly) business press releases, transfers them to an AI style guide, and then publishes a final bot press release. Never before has a style guide been so important to a business press release, and this style guide shows that automated machines for fun can indeed be just as deadly and devious as their human counterparts. And this style guide makes me not want to write software anymore.

The Lazy Geeks style guide goes here.

Van Gogh was on death row and the resulting madness and fury makes for the perfect pun

“Where Does A Fraught Place in History Begin?” asks Danish creative agency SunRan Seroole. “Dutch painter Van Gogh was facing the prospect of execution in France. During this period of his life, when it looked like death was imminent, he threw himself head first into the visual world, into painting and into art. But it wasn’t until years later that we finally understood his roots.”

“There is something voracious about Van Gogh’s thirst for visual beauty, something that will be evident to everyone who sees his landmark masterpiece The Starry Night,” confirms editor-in-chief, Karsten Svedlund. “It is a recipe for failure that follows him across his entire life, until the bicentenary of Vermeer’s birth, when he decided to work again on his masterpieces.”

After two years of intense research into the artist’s background, SunRan Seroole uncovers the tragic end to Van Gogh’s life, the hope of a younger Van Gogh’s life, and whether this story links to the life of Vermeer.”

They then proceed to answer not only why van Gogh never became a successful painter but what is particularly about Vermeer that stands out to the art experts.

Following these ambitious investigations, is revealed a new chapter in the story of Dutch painter, Johann Vermeer. How did a young nursery school teacher drive himself to paint the most famous images of men during the middle ages? And why did he choose to do so when he was, at once, rejecting modern technology and living in a time before it had reached maturity?

In an effort to reveal the artistic techniques that left Dutch art professionals so baffled, van Gogh’s mental state before and after he set out to paint the Starry Night is sought. The previously undiscovered letters from Vermeer himself reveal the evidence that brings us to the fascinating conclusion that Van Gogh’s earliest artistic idea arose from an observation on a daily basis.

“This isn’t your typical portrait exhibition,” promises SVP Paulus Scheierbroek. “We expect it to draw your eye to the viewer immediately. You can reach Vermeer himself, his visions, his eyes. The style guide is like having

Visit grover.allenai.org to explore AI2’s state-of-the-art fake news detector and generator.

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