Codex Hackathon, a Two-Day Marathon of Tech for Books

Luke Van Seters and Vignesh Mohankumar were camped out on a pair of purple couches on the third floor of the MIT Media Lab, attempting to hack written language itself.

The code that the two Northeastern students had cobbled together over the previous 48 hours analyzes an excerpt of text, then rewrites it slightly to be about a different subject, often with bizarre results. Van Seters tested it by feeding in a New York Times article about Sean Penn’s interview with cartel kingpin Joaquín Guzmán — but with instructions to rewrite it to be less about “drugs” and more about “candy.” The algorithm dutifully produced a surreal, almost-coherent account of a meeting between “Sean Hershey” and a “Mexican chocolate lord” that had taken place in a “jungle gumdrop.”