Yanny or Laurel according to Jan Bot

On how Jan Bot gets inspired by trending news to craft its own films.

The event took place in mid-May 2018. It started with a confused –and probably extremely bored– group of high school students debating if the computer generated voice they recorded from an online dictionary was saying “Yanny” or “Laurel”. Unable to agree among themselves, they started a forum on Reddit. But users of Reddit did not seem to agree either, which caused a fuss and more debate. Shortly after that, a Twitter celebrity caught this thread and posted a survey with the audio file. It asked: “What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel”. For one of those unexplainable things that make the Internet so mysterious, the Tweet became viral.

Cloe Feldman’s Tweet made ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’ viral.

Many other users started making reference to this Tweet, including prestigious institutions, like the US Department of Defense, who posted the following:

The US Department of Defense was one of the many Institutions that successfully joked about the ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’ buzz.

Even members of the White House jokingly debated around this issue.

Video produced by The Guardian where staffers at the White House are asked about “Yanny” and “Laurel”.

And while most comments succeeded in being funny, not all of them did. Some of them actually failed. And from those, some failed epically, even tragically, like the one made by the US Air Force that, trying to take advantage of the rippling success of their peers at the Department of Defense, tweeted the following:

This tweet published by the U.S. Air Force was quickly removed. But it remained long enough accessible for the press to notice it.

Definitely not funny.

After blows of trolling commentaries, the Tweet was quickly removed from the Air Force’s page. Unfortunately not quickly enough to get the attention of some of the major news sites, like CNN.

CNN comments on the Tweet posted by the US Air Force. This news item inspired Jan Bot to generate a video inspired by ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’.

So when it came the time for Jan Bot to comment on this trending topic –because “Yanny” or “Laurel”definitely was one– this CNN article served as main source of inspiration.

Here is the resulting video:

Jan Bot film inspired in ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’. Se details of the film at Jan Bot’s Catalog.

As you can see, Jan Bot’s films deflect the original meaning of the news while reflecting the real intellectual capabilities of Artificial Intelligence today. It embraces the banality of online media and uses it as inspiration for creating obscure found-footage films that feed back into the social media streams, acting as commentaries to the news that originally spawned them.