GitHub GitHub Universe 2020: Play - Creative Coding, 12 Dec 2020

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From YouTube: 10-minute Twitterbot - GitHub Universe 2020

Description

Presented by Kate Compton, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University

Dr Kate Compton (galaxykate) is a long-time generative artist, inventor, programmer, and new Assistant Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University. She wrote the first paper on procedural platform-game levels, generated the planets for the video game Spore, created the language Tracery which runs over 10000 community-made bots on Twitter, and invented an early phone-based AR system. Her mission is to design artificial intelligence to augment human creativity, and to create tools that brings AI into the hands of poets, artists, kids, and weirdos.

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Hi, I'm kate compton, I'm better known on the internet as galaxy kade, and today I'm going to be showing you a tool that I made called tracery and a website called artbot club, artbot.club and I'll be showing you how to make a twitter bot in just 10 minutes. A lot of people think that making a twitter bot or making a conversational agent needs to be this whole big production, using machine learning and advanced techniques.

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But it really doesn't so right now I'll be showing you a technique from early on in ai called context-free grammars, which is a way for you to make expansion text in an easy way that you direct entirely yourself.

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So it takes as input what's called a grammar which is just a way of specifying symbols which are kind of buckets of things and replacement rules, so you can always replace the bucket with a bunch of the different replacement rules. So you can see right here. I've just got one symbol. This is called origin. This is where all the grammars and tracery start off, and it's just hello world. It's not terribly exciting.

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So you can see. I've got five different variants of hello world there, but they're all the same, because we don't have any variants yet. So I can create a symbol, so I can make a symbol for world and I can make some options for that, so maybe github and world and where I am right now, chicago.

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And how do I use this symbol, so I can use the symbol by making a hashtag, so uh you just say hashtag world, and then you close it with another hashtag. Now you can see, I've got hello, world, hello, chicago, etc. um These are all randomly rolled, so I have to re-roll them to see if I can have some variants. So, oh there we go, there's the github one.

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So on artbot.club this is kind of where your traces are. Traces are one particular walk through your grammar and you can see I've. I've got five of them here um and they're just like randomly generated.

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So this is not terribly exciting, but I might want to say, switch out hello. So what? If we had another symbol for hello, so I can replace hello with hello in hashtags, and you can see that, even though I haven't specified that symbol, yet tracer is still okay with this. It knows that, like sometimes you make a bot- and you haven't actually finished all the stuff in your bot before you need to use it.

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So it's okay with just using placeholders right here, so you can see it puts those into parentheses that I know how to edit or that I know I have to go back and fix them so hello world, and then I can go and say all right. Well, a couple different ways to say: hello or maybe hey mihao, hello and voila. So now I've got ola, chicago, etc. uh There's another neat feature in tracery, which is you can have modifiers, so you might want to have hello, but I'd like to capitalize.

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Whatever comes back, so you can imagine well, okay, maybe I can just do that here and I can capitalize hey. Maybe sometimes I want to use this capitalized and sometimes when it used uncapitalized um and so tracer. Has this neat feature where you can just do dot capitalize, uh so there's a number of modifiers like dot, capitalize and dot s to pluralize things and I'm trying to add in some new ones that are useful, and so you can see now I have got hey, mihao, etc.

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But today I wanted to show you making a quick bot that I'm going to call t and a compliment. So it's rough times right now. People seem to need a little bit of happiness in their lives, so I'm going to make some a little uh bought on twitter. That gives people tea and a compliment.

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So the bot maybe says hello and capitalize and then says um here- is some tea and a compliment.

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You can see again, I haven't actually specified these symbols, but it's happy to just roll with this. So I can say, t is maybe let's see.

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You can see I'm creating more some more replacement rules, um cup of flavor tea, so you can see we can embed these and nest them as deeply as we want.

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And maybe some chai and maybe a couple of matcha all right, so we've got some different kinds of tea here. uh Let's see if we can get that flavor tea.

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Yeah flavor tea, and so that I can specify some.

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Like peppermint ginger uh cinnamon.

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All right, so you know now I've got like my my cup of tea um and now I might want to have another one that says: here's my so this is just giving us some practice here. So you know what is like. Oh and actually the thing that I want to do with this tea is you can see it's a little ungrammatical.

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I want to have a cup of tea, oh and uh maybe I'll say uh an ounce of coffee um or not so espresso, that's better, I'm sure so I've got some, uh maybe I'll just have, and especially I just need to start with this, because you could say see that if I said okay here is a t, uh uh espresso is ungrammatical, and so we go back to our modifiers, and so we say t dot a and now it like correctly puts a or n in front of things.

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So that's a neat feature um so yeah uh we're going to make artwork complement.

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You have adjective noun.

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And I can say, uh maybe our adjectives: let's do our nouns first, so our nouns are ideas, um emotions and, let's see eyes.

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So you have adjective eyes. So I could have things like an adjective might be valid or lovely. Maybe deep.

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Thoughtful and here's a fun one. You can reuse a lot of your different rules in different contexts to get some interesting emergence. So I might say you have flavor.

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Maybe rich flavor uh yeah. So now I have valid eyes thoughtful ideas. um Let's see yeah and you have rich cinnamon emotions, so this is very complimentary. So I like this bottle a lot already I'll show you very quickly just one other thing which is you can save things so you might want to save something to use later on.

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So I might say, let's see I'm going to save.

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The noun, so I'm going to say my noun: it doesn't matter what you call this, but I'm going to stuff into it, a noun um so any noun. And now I can say my noun. So this looks just the same where I'm using some noun, but I can say really.

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Very adjective my noun, so this will always come up with the same mind now. Normally this would be two different nouns um but yeah. You have lovely emotions, just really very thoughtful emotions, just valid emotions, really rich cinnamon and emotions.

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um So you can see that this allows you to reuse things multiple times, which is something you might want to do in bots all right, so this bot is looking pretty great. If you want to explore around some more on artbot.club, you can also unpack things, so this allows you to kind of visualize what's going on here.

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You also have this section over here, which shows you how your symbols and rules are being parsed. So I can look at origin, but I can also look at maybe here's the complement you can see that it's got all these different. uh It shows that I've got my symbol rules here. It shows me that my noun is something that it doesn't know about. um So that's just some more options on this artbot club site, but now I think we should actually put the spot on twitter. Why? Don't we all right?

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So I'm going to head over to twitter in just a moment: okay, the next thing that we're going to do is to create a twitter account to host our bot on. uh So we need a place that our bot can post. I've already made one called complimentt at twitter, so twitter requires you to make a new email account for each bot that you make, which is kind of annoying. I use the plus trick in gmail to help me out there.

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Then I create the account. I go to cheat post on quick and I have to allow access and that will allow me to post from that account. Okay, we're at the final stage of our bot making process. I've come to cheat box done click here and I can go back to artbot.club copy. My uh grammar from there go over to cheatboston, quick and paste it in you can see. Now. I've got some example tweets down there.

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I can choose one and tweet that, and hopefully, if I reload yep, we can see that it's tweeted here and I can set how often I want it to post a tweet as I can have it post every 10 minutes to once a year and then there's also a neat feature where you can say reply. So if people uh tweet at this bot, it will say hello and give them a t and a compliment. Custom made just for them. So that's it. You've made a twitter bot in just 10 minutes.

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So now you can go to artbot.club or cheapbot's done quick and make your own grammar and your own twitter bot good.

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