Colbert AI

Colbert AI is an artificial intelligence algorithm designed to tweet like Late Show host Stephen Colbert. The Twitter-bot uses transcripts of Colbert's monologues in order to compose tweets, based on degrees of probability.

This is also featured on the official subreddit for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS (r/LateShow).


Launch this Project
About the project

Say you are not as talented joke created as the jokes cracked by Stephen Colbert. What if I told you could be. This project generates jokes using Markov model.

In probability theory, a Markov model is a stochastic model used to model randomly changing systems where it is assumed that future states depend only on the current state not on the events that occurred before it (that is, it assumes the Markov property). Generally, this assumption enables reasoning and computation with the model that would otherwise be intractable. For this reason, in the fields of predictive modelling and probabilistic forecasting, it is desirable for a given model to exhibit the Markov property.

To build this project, a large corpus of data of Stephen Colbert's monologues was taken. A simple distribution is created which shows the most probabilistic word after every other word along with the count of times it appears in the distribution. After the Markov model runs successfully, you can generate as many jokes just like Stephen Colbert. You could also use them impress people at a party 😜!

This technique does not limit itself to just generating jokes like Colbert AI does, but it can also be used to different kind of text based on the corpus available.