Call of Duty Youtuber S0ur, mostly known for their deep dives on progression, challenges and unlocks, decided to perform a little experiment to see how convincing an AI would be at replicating the same style of writing seen in the blog posts and patch notes Modern Warfare has received since release. S0ur is using the popular tool Botnik for this. This is a predictive text algorithm that - when fed pages of official patch notes and weekly blog posts - generates believable sentences that resemble the source material, as believable as you’d get from a limited, Markov chain-based bot, anyway. As S0ur points out, far better results are likely possible thorough much more advanced neural networks, but this does the job.
Though it was intended as a funny shitpost, this little exercise was actually insightful. Take the blog posts, for instance. Part of my job requires keeping up with the games people are playing, so you bet I’ve read almost every one of those This Week in Call of Duty posts. Despite this, I only just realised how hard the editors push store bundles (bought with real money) in almost every paragraph. Meaningful news about new playlists, double XP weekends and what have you could easily take up a single paragraph, but they’re instead spread across several, sandwiched between highlights about the different bundles coming to the store. The bot picked up on this fact, and worked it into its own recreation. The more funny portion of the video is, without question, the patch notes themselves. It’s exactly what you imagine would happen if you just mashed together all the different words that appear in any given change log without any regard for context or meaning. They’re hilarious, and they read just like any normal patch note, only they’re complete nonsense. What sells it for me is S0ur’s deadpan delivery, as he reads through the word soup Botnik generated the same way he does with actual patch notes. It’s one of the funniest things you could watch this week, and you can see it in full above.
