What entertains the internet?

Written by Lubica Drangova on August 11, 2017

On internet, entertainment, artificial intelligence and building not-so-much-believable artificial agents.

Being funny or interesting can sometimes really be an alchemy. It is still surprising for me how some things can be interesting for people. For example Flappy bird. Very simple game, yet very irritating at the same time. For me, being instantly funny remains a mystery.

Internet is like an ocean, where you always find something new, even if you’re not trying to. A couple of months ago, my Facebook was flooded by InspiroBot – a website which generates inspirational quotes. It really catches this kitschy and dark side of Internet. You can print out your generated quote even on t-shirt or mug. And people love it.

At Mladý pes, we reserved time each month to develop a small internal project. Our ideas mostly reflect our own needs. And often, we really need an advice. So together with Veronika Kocourková from Superfilm we created an online advisor. To be precise – hairy advisor. It is a little irony on inspirational quotes, answer cubes,  captain-obvious-friends and parents.

The website pretends to be a therapist bot, who analyses the situation you describe and gives you an advice that is supposed to help. SPOILER – the answers are just randomly chosen from a pool of generic advices. But as life goes, many times it really fits. Our aim was to make it a little bit dramatical, so after you write you question / dilemma to the advisor, a hand slowly rolls up with a card that contains the advice. It takes quite long.

Here is an example of how it works:

 

 

Hairy advisor was quite popular when we presented it live at MakersTown in Brussels. People were stopping by our stand and we offered them an advice to their dilemma. At first they gave us a strange gaze. Visitors asked us, it really analyses their problem and if it collects data. Nope, it won’t collect your questions about your cat or where you should go tonight. It was fun watching the people waiting to get the answer, mostly because we hyped them about how cool the technology behind the answer-generation is. Then they got it – a short, generic advice, that surprisingly many times fit, like if there really was some superior force driving the random number generator.  It worked, they appreciated, laughed and we were happy.

To be honest, I expected much more understanding and interest from people on the internet. I started to have doubts about our sense of humour. So I wrote this article to give you a second chance. Please, enjoy hairy advisor. It doesn’t collect any data, advice is free and always high quality.

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