Startup Spotlight: Can a machine learn to laugh? Botnik crosses a comedian with AI to find out

If the game Cards Against Humanity and those refrigerator poetry magnets had a digital baby bestowed with machine learning, it would look something like Botnik. This Seattle-based startup is actually the comedic offspring of Jamie Brew, previously a head writer for ClickHole, a satirical website connected to The Onion, and Bob Mankoff, cartoon and humor editor of Esquire and former cartoon editor of The New Yorker. "Bob and I started Botnik after a series of long phone calls converging on the idea that comedy writing isn't a problem that an algorithm can solve," Brew said. "We didn't really care for fully automatic creativity (such as Google DeepMind's attempt to win The New Yorker Caption Contest) and were far more interested in human-machine collaboration." Botnik builds a "predictive keyboard" of words taken from various sources -- beauty ads, nature shows, famous poets, dialogue from "Seinfeld" episodes and even combinations of sources, including the unlikely triumvirate that is Beowulf/Maya Angelou/forklift manual.