Bonus 36: Generating a Lingthusiasm episode using a neural net (Patreon)

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: And I’m Lauren Gawne.

Lauren: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch. So I mentioned some of my favourite Harry Potter books, and I found Harry Potter and the Cursed Child –

Gretchen: The Cruciatus Linguists?

This is what happens when the robots take over Lingthusiasm.

In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Janelle Shane, our interview guest from episode 40, demonstrates to Gretchen and Lauren how to train an artificial intelligence called GPT-2 on our 70+ Lingthusiasm transcripts, of both main and bonus episodes. Together, we create on air Robo-Lauren and Robo-Gretchen, cohosts of Robo-Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic (but not very coherent) about linguistics. 

We then perform some of our favourite Robo-Lingthusiasm snippets that the AI generated, including the part where we prompted the neural net on a mix of Lingthusiasm episodes and Harry Potter fanfiction and got some really, um, magical results.  (We couldn't decide whether to make a regular-length episode or keep in more of the funny examples, so we've split the difference by putting extra examples after the credits, so you can decide whether you want to listen to them or not.) Needless to say, none of the Robo-Lingthusiasm parts should be taken as accurate information about linguistics. 

We also have an early patron-only announcement of the LingComm Grant, a $500 grant for communicating linguistics to broader audiences. Stay tuned for the full announcement in the upcoming weeks. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Lingthusiasm Episode 40, the main interview with Janelle Shane (you should probably listen to the main interview episode before the bonus here)
• A 440 page Google Doc of many lines of Robo-Lingthusiasm 
• LingComm Grant website 

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript is available for this episode as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page.

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All ThingsLinguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.