Cliché Soup

A reader sent in this bot that they made. It takes a list of clichés, feeds it through a markov chain, and does an image search for the picture that best represents the brand new proverbial saying.

The creator mentioned in the message that one of the appeals was in not knowing what the bot will do next. I think that’s one of the pleasures of bot-making that I enjoy them most, when I get to be surprised by my own creations. 

That’s what’s fun about projects like this or Darius Kazemi’s Random Shopper. In a world that is increasingly optimized and efficiently-recommendation-searched into bland averages, breaking out of meaning-drained clichés can result in some striking juxtapositions. 

Of course, that can sometimes be dangerous too. If a bot does something illegal or immoral, who is responsible? Particularly if it happens in a way the creator never anticipated?

On a more positive note, an algorithm that deconstructs something, as this one does with clichés, can end up telling us something about the thing it’s deconstructing. The bot can only re-purpose the patterns it sees in the original phrases. The new generated phrases can hold our unexamined assumptions in front of us, like a fun-house mirror. (A very OuLiPoian concept.)