Read What Happens When a Robot Writes an Episode of Friends

Scottish cartoonist Andy Pandy is best known for his darkly humorous comics, featuring everything from film noir-style detectives to silly fish puns. But in 2016, Pandy turned from illustrating to screenwriting. With the help of a recurrent neural network, the cartoonist generated a series of brand-new Friends screenplays sure to delight fans of the classic sitcom.

On Twitter, Pandy explained: “I fed a recurrent neural network with the scripts for every episode of Friends and it learned to generate new scenes.”

With its knowledge of the characters, language, and plot points used on the hit sitcom, Pandy’s robot created several new scenarios. For the most part, the robot’s Friends scenes are as absurd as you’d expect: In one, Chandler interacts with the gang from inside a muffin. In another, Joey nonsensically requests “a clown on the table.” But a few excerpts, especially when isolated from the larger scene, feel surprisingly plausible (for instance, Chandler's tendency to start sentences with the word "So"). Check out the robot’s Friends scenarios below, and visit Pandy's website to learn more about his work:

This story has been updated for 2019.