Skip to main content

Neural network-generated Coachella band names don’t get any better than ‘Bustles Muckson’

Neural network-generated Coachella band names don’t get any better than ‘Bustles Muckson’

/

So excited to see my favorite band, ‘Billions of Mario’

Share this story

2017 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival - Weekend 2 - Day 2
Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images for Coachella

At this point, it’s practically tradition to see photoshopped Coachella line-up posters pop up right after the official line-up has been released, but there’s always a couple of gems that stand out from the rest. AI community Botnik Studios, makers behind viral hits like the AI-generated Harry Potter fanfic, just released their take on the Coachella band line-up poster. The list was generated by training a neural network on thousands of band names, and includes must-see acts like “Horse Choir” and “Man Mist”.

Botnik Studios

Botnik Studios calls itself an “augmented comedy creation platform”, and most notably uses predictive text keyboards to generate scripts for classic shows like X-files. The platform also weighs in on more current events, like training the keyboards on both Fire & Fury and McDonald’s menu item descriptions to leak “exclusive bombshell details about the Trump administration.”

AI-generated band names isn’t a new experiment. Optics researcher Janelle Shane created “Metal band names invented by neural network” last year, which trained a neural network with a dataset of 100,000 bands, subgenres, and countries of origin to create names like “Sun Damage Omen - Symphonic Progressive Metal - France.”

A lot of algorithmic text generation — which is increasingly appearing in social media in the form of Twitter bots and comedic parodies — seems like it’s randomly produced, but Botnik Studios’ work is more of a collaboration with machines. Clickhole writer and Botnik co-founder Jamie Brew explained to FiveThirtyEight that with the program he uses, “instead of making a random choice that you don’t get to see, it gives you the top 10 options [for the next word] and lets you choose at each step, in the same way that a predictive-text phone feature does.”

Take a moment out of your day and have fun reading all the band names way down to the tiny font zones (which I’m convinced is strategically designed that way to weed out the olds). And if you ever do make it out to Coachella, don’t forget to check out the “large-scale art installations by Mr. Wall.”