What would it take to get actor Zach Braff to revive his lovable Scrubs character J.D. for the first time since the show’s conclusion in 2010? The perfect script … written by an artificial intelligence, apparently.
This week, certified geek Braff took to Twitter to record himself reading a version of one of the show’s closing monologues, only created by a generative bot trained on real Scrubs scripts. According to its creators, Botnik Studios, the ensuing offbeat A.I. masterpiece can be summed up as, “the exact average episode of Scrubs.” Well, kind of.
In which I perform the final monologue of a Scrubs script written by a computer. Happy Holidays. pic.twitter.com/49ftogeB05
— Zach Braff (@zachbraff) December 18, 2017
“The truth is, every patient suffers from dementia,” Braff reads. “I’m not gonna change all of that, after all — the right thing is not always the best thing to do. You’d know that if you ever worked in a hospital.”
That may sound pretty average, but the script then veers into oddball territory when we hear that, “A hospital is a lot like a high school: The most amazing man is dying, and you are the only one who wants to steal stuff from his dad.” He also informs us that, “Being in a hospital is a lot like being in a sorority. You have greasers and surgeons and even though it sucks about Dr. Tapioca, I’m not even that sad.” The final stage direction of the script? “He exits, smugly echoing.”
If this all reads like a predictive text message gone wrong, you’re actually halfway accurate. As with Botnik’s recent Harry Potter story-generating bot, the Scrubs script was created through a custom keyboard which predicts which phrases should come next, much like the keyboard on your smartphone can do. In this case, however, the fact that it was trained on frequent recurrent word pairings and sentences from Scrubs means that the results sound oddly like they could have come from the show itself.
Best I could do pic.twitter.com/m0HVEHFGNm
— Joel Kelly (@JoelKellyDesign) December 18, 2017
Braff was seemingly so taken by the Botnik-written script that he actually reached out to the other former cast members of Scrubs to try and get them to join in the fun. Sadly, there’s been no response thus far.
