Drama is no stranger to Reddit, as many of you all might know. And while more than a few have snickered or giggled at Reddit arguments that have exploded or taken strange twists and turns, there’s now a new way to check out what’s happening in the comments.
Micah Price, a software engineer from Cape Town, South Africa, on Sunday unveiled a genius bot that turns Reddit arguments into scenes from Ace Attorney, the Capcom series in which attorney Phoenix Wright fights to get his clients off the hook using his investigative and courtroom skills, Mashable reported. The video arguments come with the dramatic music and the famous “Objection!” catchphrase. The results are entertaining, hilarious, and honestly sometimes don’t make sense. There are, of course, some that do elicit an appalled, “Oh God,” when you see what people are arguing about.
In an interview with Mashable, Price said that he got the idea from other meme-based videos of the game on YouTube.
“The dramatic music is great,” Price told the outlet, “especially for the melodramatic debates on Reddit.”
According to the video about the bot Price posted on YouTube, the bot checks for the most common users in the comment chain and then loops all of the comments in their chain. A neural network then proceeds to check whether the tone of the comment is negative or positive. If the comment is deemed negative, it’ll evoke an “Objection!” Meanwhile, a comment deemed positive would provoke a happy expression. The bot, which takes about 10 minutes to reply, will then make a video based on the comments and send it to the user in a link on Reddit.
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You can see an example video from the bot below.
Now to the big question on everyone’s minds: Can you use it? The bot can be used by anyone on Reddit who types in “!objectionbot” or “!objection-bot” in the comments. There’s one catch though: The subreddit you post in has to be on the bot’s list of supported subreddits, which you can see here. If your preferred subreddit for arguing is not on the list, Price is taking suggestions on which ones he should add.
The bot took about three days to make, Price said, adding that he used Python as well as computer vision and machine learning libraries in the development. It is open-source and can be found on GitHub. Shortly after its launch, the bot was “uber buggy,” he said. In fact, according to the bot’s user page, u/objection-bot, it broke for a couple of hours when Price went to sleep. He fixed it later on though, and the bot reports that it is, “back and running for now.”
You can check out the videos of the arguments—which include some about the Emoji Movie, the laws that would exist if Pokémon were real, and the developer of Cyberpunk 2077—the bot has made on its user page.
