Meet Botnik, the Surreal Comedy App That's Turning AI Into LOL

"Innovation," Jeff Bezos once said, "happens by gently lifting a grandfather and asking him for six different ideas." It's the work of Botnik, a new AI-assisted humor application that scours various types of human-created, word-crowded content--from season-three Seinfeld scripts to Yelp reviews to Bezos' shareholder letters--in order to build predictive, idiom-specific keyboards. Those keyboards, many of which are available on Botnik.org, The best Botnik creations, like this PBS-derived set of otter facts, retain the structure and wordplay of their source material, while adding a goofy, appropriately robotic sense of stiltedness. They all represent a new form of comedy, a human-computer collaboration, one that "gathers all these evocative phrases from a genre, and then builds them together in an absurd collage," says Botnik cofounder Jamie Brew. Botnik began in earnest last year, when Brew--then a writer for The Onion's site Clickhole--began talking with Bob Mankoff, the artist and former New Yorker cartoon editor who, in 2005, launched that magazine's popular caption-writing contest.