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            Understanding genres and their conventions have enabled people to make software that generate genres. These “genre generators” use a certain genre’s conventions and create an example of that genre. Patterns of some genres have become so predictable that they could be programmed in a computer. The programmers who developed these “genre generators” know how certain genres are set up and used that knowledge to let internet users create works of that particular genre.

A genre as sophisticated as Computer Science research papers could be broken down and replicated by a machine. SCIgen, the automatic CS paper generator, allows the user to create a computer-made CS paper just by entering a name of an author and then pushing a button. All of the papers generated in SCIgen follow the same format: title, authors’ names, abstract, introduction, body, conclusion, and references. For “genre generators” like this to work, it would require consistency. If the paper has information that makes sense, the rest of the information on the paper must not only make sense, but be coherent as well. However, having a machine write a valid paper would require more than just patterns. So to solve this problem, everything that is written on the paper must be complete nonsense. The point of this generator is not to create a legitimate CS paper but to show what a typical CS paper may look like, or “to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards” as mentioned in the “About” section of the SCIgen homepage. To give some credibility to the paper, academic language is used. They also included graphs and figures to make the paper more believable. To make the graphs and figures appear true, the paper uses the first-person word “we” as if to show that personal research had been done to obtain the data. I personally searched the references used in the generated papers and I learned that they were also fake. One of the authors were actually “agjhk”, the made-up author name that I entered.

Another “genre generator” is Pandyland, a comic generator. Every comic is comprised of images and text inside speech bubbles. Pandyland makes exactly that. As it says on its website, Pandyland is random, so like SCIgen, some of the comics generated might not make sense. The comics users can make only have three panels: beginning, middle, and end. Because of that, the stories created are not too intricate and don’t make much sense. It does however give room for the viewer to use their imagination and make sense out of the comic. It is easy to assume that Pandyland’s intention is to provoke humor as the panels contain silly elements to them. A generator that produces random and nonsensical images with the intention of comedy would have a better chance of receiving a positive response from the audience than with the intention to produce serious comics. With Pandyland, preset images with no apparent context are shuffled to make a somewhat sensible comic.

Instead of having prewritten text, Memegenerator just provides a template and lets the users create the text. These memes that users create consist of an image with text on the top and bottom of the picture. The top text is usually the intro to the joke and the bottom would be the punchline. The generator provides different meme images for people to use. Each of these images have their own context and creators use jokes that fit with the context of that image. One example of a meme image is Bad Luck Brian. The picture shows a boy who someone could say appears unlucky and the textual jokes used with the picture involves Brian getting into very unfortunate events. These individual meme images are a genre themselves.

A “genre generator” that I found called Chaoticshiny, specializes in writing and gaming for the game Dungeons and Dragons. For people that run out of ideas for their story, they could use the generator to make stuff for them. It has multiple generators to choose from including a civilization generator, name generators, and even an RPG Drinking Game generator. One that stood out to me was their tarot card generator. It lets you choose the quantity of tarot cards you want to create and which information from description, meaning, condition, and the back of the card you want to include. The format of the tarot card is simple; it starts with what image is on the card, then says what is associated with it and what it represents. A description of what’s on the back of the card could also be included. Using conventions of a tarot card, the program can randomize the stereotypical information on a tarot card and combine them to make a new card.