Reddit arguments can be a great deal of fun to read, but watching them unfold in a courtroom brings it to a whole new level.
First reported by Mashable, software engineer Micah Prince created a bot that takes arguments found on Reddit and turns them into an animated scene straight out of the Ace Attorney series. The bot examines the thread on Reddit and inserts the text into a courtroom debate between protagonist Phoenix Wright and fellow attorney Miles Edgeworth.
Prince told Mashable he got the idea from other meme-based videos of the game found on YouTube. The bot uses a network to look for the most common redditors in the thread. The most common plays the role of Phoenix while the second most becomes Edgeworth. Everyone else found in the thread fills a random character. It then uses a neutral network to check the tone of the comments. If it defines the comment as negative the bot will count it as an objection. Positive comments will see the character sprites as happy.
“The dramatic music is great,” he told Mashable, “especially for the melodramatic debates on Reddit.”
The best part about the bot, anyone can make the video. Redditors can comment “!objectionbot” or “!objection-bot” to a thread on Reddit. The bot will scan it, create a video, and automatically link it in the thread in about 10 minutes. The bot doesn’t work on all subreddits though and you can find the current list of supported subreddits here. Currently, Price plans to keep the bot running for at least a couple of months before deciding what to do from there.
“If it’s anything like my other side projects I’ll just end up abandoning it though,” Price explained. “Although maybe someone else will pick it up, it’s open source.”
