Humorous & Interesting AI Talk on Sri Lanka

There is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) website Talk to Transformer which had been in existence until it got discontinued this week. Despite the sad news, this blog post is paying tribute to this bot. The user types in some text and presses the ‘Complete Text’ button which generates additional material. The button changes to ‘Generate Another’ once it has been generated. It gets its content ideas from going through the Internet. It is created by Canadian machine learning engineer Adam King. The material it gives is often funny and sometimes even true. I decided to post a collection of Talk to Transformer content that I initiated relating to my country Sri Lanka. As my hometown is Colombo, I did make many references to the city. I will give my thoughts alongside them.

The Country

I’m starting with topics about the country itself. The first one relates to Colombo, Sri Lanka with it

giving a fictional account of Colombo & Sri Lanka from someone married to a Sri Lankan. I’d like to

point out that I didn’t specify the wife's perspective. It came up with that on its own.

This one relates to the issue of bribery & corruption with a fictional person talking about it.

This one is about Colombo. It obviously doesn’t contain 25% of the world’s urban population. The

city names for Colombo aren’t real. I really like “The City of Night” as I think Colombo looks its best

at nighttime. I don’t think the statistics in the second paragraph are accurate.

Here’s something positive about Sri Lanka from an imaginary traveller. The places mentioned don’t

really exist in Sri Lanka.

Music

This section deals with music. I’m going to feature content about two types of Sri Lankan music,

being the Portuguese influenced baila and sinhala pop. These are false, and as a result of it, it’s

quite funny. 

My favourite instrument is piano. So I put in a question about piano in Sri Lankan music. I’m pleased

that it mentioned rock music, as I like piano in rock music. A Sri Lankan classic rock song I love is

“Api Kawruda” by Senaka Batagoda. I wrote a blog post about it. It features great piano by Janath

Kulathilake. 

Sci-Fi/The Future

I’m beginning this section featuring Sri Lanka involved in sci-fi hollywood films. It’s imagining

Christopher Nolan shooting a sci-fi action film in Sri Lanka, which I’d like to see. When it comes to

his sci-fi action films, I love “Inception” and am looking forward to his upcoming film “Tenet”. It seems

that in this fiction below, he’s trying to attract politicians with the reference to luxury vehicles. 

I’m now featuring Sri Lankan sci-fi content. The following two topics deal with points I mentioned in

my article “The Potential of Sri Lankan English Comics”, with this one dealing with time travel. I

wonder what it means how this time traveller “warps”. 

Here’s a story of aliens landing in Sri Lanka in Viharamahadevi Park.

The last one is asking what Sri Lanka will be like in 2050. It’s false, with it giving a contradictory

argument about size and population. The figure it mentions of 8 million square kilometres is roughly

the size of Brazil which is in stark contrast to Sri Lanka’s 65, 610 square kilometres. A population of

4 million people in 8 million square kilometres is the exact opposite of density. This one is so funny.

I hope you enjoyed this. I’d be interested to hear people’s interpretations of content featured here

and/or expansions of them. This is an example of the funny side of AI.