伏地魔還能懷孕?

Harry Potter fans who have already finished reading The Cursed Child and A Journey Through the History of Magic from the past two years have a new chapter in the story of the wizarding boy to tide them over—one brought to us not by J.K. Rowling, but by AI-generated text prediction.

兩年來，哈利波特粉絲熟讀《被詛咒的孩子》和《魔法史之旅》，現在他們又有了關於魔法男孩的新故事。

Botnik Studios created the three-page chapter, titled “Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash,” after training an algorithmic tool on all seven of the children's fantasy novels. The end result is a tale with a plot that feels soulless and meandering but like any good fanfiction, still holds a faint imprint of Rowling’s usual lilting whimsical charm.

但是作者不是JK羅琳，而是人工智能文本預測機器人。工作室Botnik Studios 根據前七部哈利波特設計了算法工具，創作出三頁故事，名爲“哈利波特與大團灰塵疑似圖”。故事讀起來沒有靈魂，格外曲折，但是還是能在這類同人小說中感受到羅琳歡快、奇特的風格。

Both the chapter and the predictive text program—available on GitHub—is the work of Jamie Brew, a former writer for Clickhole and The Onion.

預測故事內容目前可在網站GitHub上閱讀，都出自傑米·布魯（Jamie Brew）之手。布魯此前是媒體Clickhole和The Onion的作家。

The aforementioned Harry Potter excerpt was constructed with the help of multiple writers, who helped construct the sentence through a combination of algorithmic suggestion and authorial discretion. As a result, the chapter reads not like the usual word salad of text prediction, but like unusually inventive fanfiction. “The castle grounds snarled with a wave of magically magnified wind,” it begins. “The sky outside was a great black ceiling, which was full of blood.”

前述提到的哈利波特節選內容由諸多作家合作完成，他們在算法的建議下重組句子，間或使用作家的審慎完成故事。這樣，故事讀起來就不太像平常說的話，而是富有創造性的奇特同人小說了。“風受到魔力驅使，逐漸加強風力，城堡地表開始嘯叫”，開頭這樣寫道，“城堡外，天空變成了黑漆漆的頂，鮮血四溢。”

There are plenty of Harry Potter fanfics that explore outlandish scenarios— those featuring a pregnant Voldemort, for instance — and ones of impressive quality. Fanfiction is often used as a stepping stone for writers to get comfortable with language and worldbuilding. The process used by Botnik, which the company refers to as “collaborating with machines,” mixes the creativity of dozens of humans with the absurdity of machines trying to imitate us, and the result is sometimes, dare I say it, magical.

有不少哈利波特同人小說情節奇異，比如身懷六甲的伏地魔等，水平還都頗高。同人小說是作家用來搭建語言和故事的墊腳石。Botnik工作室選擇“和程序合作”，是將許多人的創造力和機器的荒誕結合起來，模仿人類，不得不說，有時候確實還挺神奇的。