A reader who calls himself Angry Young Man has figured out a way to automate New Yorker cartoon captions — using New Yorker short stories. He writes:
I recently discovered the AutoSummarize feature in MS Word, which pulls key sentences from a text and creates an executive summary.
I wondered, What if you AutoSummarize an AutoSummary, and so on and so on? And what would you come up with if you used New Yorker stories as your text? I chose NYer stories because I consider them profoundly boring. But the AutoSummaries are brilliant. Really, they could be captions for NYer cartoons.
Here, for instance, is the ultimate AutoSummary after six iterations of this week’s story, “Bravado,” by William Trevor:
“Cheers, Aisling.”