The primary reason why Botmin created Bots of New York wasn't mockery. "I started doing the bot to learn more about bots and advances in natural language generation," they told Bored Panda. "Then it started making me laugh pretty regularly so I kept doing it to entertain myself."
Eventually, the community started growing and making them laugh even more than the posts.
"As for tech, its a bit complicated but the core of the caption generation is a natural language model called GPT-2. I use variations of the medium and large models, finetuned on the entire Humans of New York captions corpus, updated regularly," Botmin explained.
The GPT-2 model (a successor to GPT) was trained to predict the next word in 40GB of Internet text. However, due to its developers' concerns about malicious applications of the technology, they didn't release the model to the public. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, they released a much smaller model for researchers like Botmin to experiment with. If you want to give this model a writing prompt, you can see how it is able to complete your text here.
Coming back to Bots of New York, let's just hope nobody will make them into actual humanoids. We already have too many soulless economists and clueless politicians.
