Botnik Studios is an organization co-founded by a former New Yorker cartoon editor and a Clickhole alumnus that bills itself as “a community of writers, artists and developers building and using machine tools to remix and transform language.” In the spirit of festival lineup announcement season, they’ve put their algorithmic “neural network” to use making a fake Coachella lineup composed entirely of artists that do not exist. Joke lineups are nothing new, but according to Botnik, this one was generated by a program that analyzed existing band names in order to come up with unlikely (but how unlikely, really?) new ones. It seems the computer managed to produce some genuinely hilarious monikers—not that we’d be able to tell if the lineup’s creators slipped in any analog human jokes. Some of our favorites:
- Lil Hack
- Ben Sex
- The Bootleg Tims
- Smushy Twins
- Beth Factory
- Beak Friends
- Lard House
- Man Mist
- Max Beaf
- Billions of Mario
- Mighty Gross
- Jacked Like a Man
If you have time to kill, the Botnik team has also built single-use predictive keyboards based on source material like Radiohead lyrics, Seinfeld dialogue, and the text of the Harry Potter books. See their full computer-generated Coachella lineup below, and check the actual, real-life 2018 Coachella lineup here.
Announcing your 2018 COACHELLA LINEUP, generated by a neural network trained on thousands of band names: https://t.co/EskuBWOdfy pic.twitter.com/J06jgc3x2R
— Botnik Studios (@botnikstudios) January 23, 2018
