Jamie Brew of Botnik gave a talk at Strange Loop 2023 called Comedy Writing with Small Generative Models.

The talk itself was very entertaining, with musical interludes mashing up “the Beatles” and “Craigslist ads for vehicles”, and while the algorithms were (by Jamie's own admission) pretty straightforward, there was a lot of room for expression in finding good corpuses, mashing them up, and finding fun ways to apply them.

It was an excellent reminder to me that there's an entire world of stuff you can do with computers that isn't commercial, isn't “hard tech” or “cutting edge” but is nevertheless utterly delightful.