Picasso, Pato and Perro: Reconciling Procedure with Creativity

This paper presents and details 'Pato and Perro on the Movies,' a system that generates web comics about recently released movies. Information is extracted about movies from the internet and a series of panels are drawn with dialogue to set up a punchline in the comic's final frame. Definitions of creativity commonly used to examine computational processes are presented and used to examine this system. The system is used to discuss a common critique of creative systems, namely that procedural creation inherently limits the range of potential content produced. This paper argues that procedure and creativity can be reconciled, and that much of the content produced by humans is subject to similar critique. Finally, we discuss the implications of characterizing many human acts of creation as procedural. Pato and Perro on the Movies 'Pato and Perro on the Movies' is a web comic written and drawn by a machine. Each comic gives bite sized impressions of a recently released film and closes with a punch line about one of the characters' mothers. Consider a comic produced by the system in Figure 1. The system's procedure for creating a comic tries to meet these requirements: -The subject must be a recently released film. -Both a negative and a positive statement about the film should be presented if at all possible. -The statement in the second panel should be fertile language for generating a punchline. -That punchline should aim to be a humorous re-interpretation of language seen in the second panel. Figure 1: a comic created by Pato and Perro on the movies Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Creativity 78 To accomplish these goals, the system mines movie reviews from rottentomatoes.com, a popular movie review site, for the week's top box office hits as well as bite-sized commentary of both positive and negative sentiment pertaining to these movies (see Figure 2). The bite-sized commentary is provided on each films' Rotten Tomatoes page. A section of each page is devoted to a wall of choice snippets from different reviews. The snippets are marked with a ripe tomato when the sentiment of the snippet is positive and a green splat when the sentiment is negative. This marker is used to determine the valence for a snippet when it is used to create dialogue in the comic. The snippets are also analyzed using WordNet (Fellbaum 1998) for potential humorous meanings. The system's best pick is selected for the second panel, and another comment of opposing sentiment is selected to provide contrast in the first panel, or a flat statement of preference like the one seen in Panel 1 of Figure 1 is used. Tension is interesting and plays an important role in the build up to the punchline (Napier 2004) so it is important that the first two panels contain statements of opposing sentiment. The final panel receives the punchline. To craft a punchline from text, the system follows this approach: -tokenize and tag the text that appears in the second panel of the comic -identify verb and noun phrases that occur in the text -compute the wordnet distance between the adjectives, verbs and nouns of a phrase to a set of humorous concepts pre-assembled by hand. -pick the verb or noun-phrase with the shortest distance to this target set of humorous concepts -form the punchline based on whether or not the phrase is a verb or noun phrase The system relies on WordNet, a precompiled database of words and their semantic distances from one another. The method used to compute semantic distance was developed by Philip Resnik (Resnik 1995). This distance is used to determine how easily a phrase can be interpreted as something humorous. Put another way, the system uses a word's WordNet semantic similarity with another word as a proxy for how likely those words can be conflated in meaning. For example, in the comic illustrated in Figure 1, a bull is semantically similar to a donkey, which is considered a humorous topic appropriate for a punchline. The system, in evaluating the words in panel two, selected 'raging bull' for this semantic similarity and crafted the punchline. The result of the system's procedure is a comic strip. If a person had assembled this strip we would call it creative. Can we say the same of this system?