Have an excruciatingly long essay to write? Can’t get past the writer’s block plaguing your mind? No inspiration for your story or poem? Never fear, predictive keyboards are here! Instead of pulling words and ideas out of your mind to write something, you can check out talktotransformer.com, a predictive keyboard that can finish any piece of writing you have. The keyboard stores thousands of texts ranging from the poems of Shakespeare to angry online rants. It then uses these stored texts to match your writing style and finish your writing in the style you used.
Although predictive keyboards can write, they are NOT human, so they will generate some interesting results when they try to finish your prompts or ideas…
English Essay
Here’s what the keyboard put out when I gave it the first few sentences of my English essay (shown in bold text):
Passion is a force that unleashes creativity. This cannot be more true when it comes to modern society, which views creativity and inspiration as a source of truth in a world of disconnection and materialism. The song “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel is able to demonstrate this theme through an effective use of literary devices. It was also with this character to highlight this idea that I created Artifice, a character. He was part of a government plot to create some kind of artificial intelligence. By using a cognitive scientist from a military background, he is a success in creating AIs. These AIs will make the world a better place and enable people to live and not want for food.
Truly insightful! I love the casual references to a hidden government conspiracy theory…
Lab Report
After seeing how the keyboard made my essay so much better, I gave it the introduction of my lab report (again, shown in bold text) to finish:
Osmosis is the passive transport of water across a semipermeable membrane that affects all cells, including potato cells. The method was originally discovered by a Japanese researcher by the name of Takahashi (Takahashi and E. G. Warthen, 1934). In 1935, he was conducting a study to determine the action of Xanthochlorine on the hydrophobic properties of several vegetable plants. After it had become known that in aqueous solutions Xanthochlorine increases the solubility of water, the worker named the isolated proton-exchange chemical Xanthochlorine Oxide as Takahashi's next invention.
That actually wasn’t that bad! The correct citation is especially impressive.
Shakespearian Sonnet
If the keyboard can help with my writing, it can help with Shakespeare’s too! Here, I gave the keyboard the first two lines of Shakespeare’s famous “Sonnet 18”:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Thou art more comely and more comely. O thou worthily, mother, art comely for thee; At thy beauty like to that of the night. And what sayest thou, Alceste, the beauty of thine eye? Of thy cheeks like to those of a raven in the cedarwood. Of thy gait as a panther that seeketh by night to the tree, As meek as a lioness in the pasture.
Oh no… at least it tried.
And Finally… a Wikipedia Entry!
I gave the keyboard one last challenge and tested how much it knew about Marvel’s most infamous supervillain, Thanos. Here’s how it completed the first sentence of Thanos’ Wikipedia entry:
Thanos is a fictional supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. He is primarily known as one of the main antagonists of the 2008 film Iron Man and his individual appearances throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His real name is War Machine.
Great! I always wanted to know Thanos’ real name!
Conclusion
Obviously, predictive keyboards can’t write the way we do-they have no idea of our lives, our culture, or our intent. However, it’s still good to try them out once in a while, just to get a good laugh!
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