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Yes. And it’s a strange one. I made a program to gender swap any text you put into it and then got a book deal to rewrite and illustrate Fairy Tales. It’s been

Yes. And it’s a strange one. I made a program to gender swap any text you put into it and then got a book deal to rewrite and illustrate Fairy Tales. It’s been published around the world. https://genderswappedfairytales.com https://genderswappedfairytales.com The idea is to shine a light on the original versions but it also creates a lot of never-written-before characters. A lot of brave princesses and lady-beasts, but also men desperately wanting children and being rewarded for kindness. I wrote the gender swap algorithm in Swift. It seemed like it would just be a simple auto replace type thing when I started but there’s some weird things in English, for example with his/him/her/hers where they don’t swap back and forth sensibly and you have to understand the context. It was his > it was hers. It was his sword > it was her sword So I ended up down this rabbit hole of natural language processing to break up each sentence into verbs, nouns etc to work out the correct words to use. Even tried training an AI to do it based on the finished swapped text but a whole bunch of rules worked more reliably.

netsharc 5y ago
The Inclusive Coding Bot (a stupid Github bot that went around Github making pull requests replacing "he" with "they") guy should've talked to you... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877930
- KMag 5y ago
  Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat medireview mistakes. (I'm old enough to remember when Yahoo's attempt at preventing cross-site scripting, blindly replacing eval with review, resulted in such shenanigans as "Please reviewuate my CV for Professor of Medireview History". Some of the corruptions persisted outside of Yahoo mail when people emailed text to themselves as a form of file transfer. Yes, this went into production in one of the two largest email providers at the time.)
- HellsMaddy 5y ago
  People need to stop thinking this bot was a serious attempt. It is very obviously a troll making fun of people who advocate for gender neutral phrasing.
  - sn9 5y ago
    Poe's Law strikes again.
conductr 5y ago
Sounds like an interesting challenge although I’ll admit on this one I would have just went to fiver and hired someone to edit the existing text. My guess is under and week and a couple hundred bucks at most and you’d be set.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  I think this is a case of "chop your wood and it will warm you twice"... ie. the value derived from this exercise was not just from the outcome, but also the journey there!
  - conductr 5y ago
    Totally agree and get it, I do it selectively as well - and on this one, I don't think I would have enjoyed the challenge of it so I would have just outsourced the work to be done manually. It's such a straight forward thing to explain to someone else, I think most gig workers that spoke english reasonably well could quickly knock it out. Actually, so much so that since most of these stories are fairly short and you probably end up proofreading them dozen of times as you tweak the code and/or review the outsourced work for accuracy/completion... so I might have just done it myself manually and it would have taken probably less than a dozen hours without the communication overhead of going through fiver or similar. It's more of a do things that don't scale approach I suppose as myself with a toddler that loves reading stories I value my time above all else and could find a dozen more interesting things to hack on in my limited free time (highly subjective I know, just my hot take on the topic at hand).
    - jonplackett 5y ago
      One reason it was nice was to instantly swap the story and get to read it back as if it’s new.. if I’d had to swap it all myself I’d already have been bored of it by the time I was done! Also allowed swapping lots of versions to see which I liked best. But I have to admit too, that I just wanted to see if I could make it work ;)
HellsMaddy 5y ago
This is so cool! I think I'm going to gift your book to my niblings next Christmas. Thank you for sharing!
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Thank so much! I hope you enjoy
abeppu 5y ago
For anyone else who enjoys this, consider the Jailbreak the Patriarchy browser extension, which does basically this for text on the web. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jailbreak-the-patriarchy/fiidcfoaaciclafodoficaofidfencgd?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jailbreak-the-patr...
- jonplackett 5y ago
  This is great, thanks - this was actually my initial idea and it sat there in my head for 5 years and then morphed into doing a book. We’re doing a sequel this year and I’m going to redo the website with the aim of turning genderswapping into a movement and getting other people to join in. I’ll link this this for sure!
camgunz 5y ago
Wow this book is beautiful! Thank you for sharing.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Thanks! It’s illustrated by my wife. She did a frickin incredible job! More of her stuff here if you’re interested: KarrieFransman.com

netsharc 5y ago

The Inclusive Coding Bot (a stupid Github bot that went around Github making pull requests replacing "he" with "they") guy should've talked to you... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877930

KMag 5y ago
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat medireview mistakes. (I'm old enough to remember when Yahoo's attempt at preventing cross-site scripting, blindly replacing eval with review, resulted in such shenanigans as "Please reviewuate my CV for Professor of Medireview History". Some of the corruptions persisted outside of Yahoo mail when people emailed text to themselves as a form of file transfer. Yes, this went into production in one of the two largest email providers at the time.)
HellsMaddy 5y ago
People need to stop thinking this bot was a serious attempt. It is very obviously a troll making fun of people who advocate for gender neutral phrasing.
- sn9 5y ago
  Poe's Law strikes again.

conductr 5y ago

Sounds like an interesting challenge although I’ll admit on this one I would have just went to fiver and hired someone to edit the existing text. My guess is under and week and a couple hundred bucks at most and you’d be set.

tailspin2019 5y ago
I think this is a case of "chop your wood and it will warm you twice"... ie. the value derived from this exercise was not just from the outcome, but also the journey there!
- conductr 5y ago
  Totally agree and get it, I do it selectively as well - and on this one, I don't think I would have enjoyed the challenge of it so I would have just outsourced the work to be done manually. It's such a straight forward thing to explain to someone else, I think most gig workers that spoke english reasonably well could quickly knock it out. Actually, so much so that since most of these stories are fairly short and you probably end up proofreading them dozen of times as you tweak the code and/or review the outsourced work for accuracy/completion... so I might have just done it myself manually and it would have taken probably less than a dozen hours without the communication overhead of going through fiver or similar. It's more of a do things that don't scale approach I suppose as myself with a toddler that loves reading stories I value my time above all else and could find a dozen more interesting things to hack on in my limited free time (highly subjective I know, just my hot take on the topic at hand).
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    One reason it was nice was to instantly swap the story and get to read it back as if it’s new.. if I’d had to swap it all myself I’d already have been bored of it by the time I was done! Also allowed swapping lots of versions to see which I liked best. But I have to admit too, that I just wanted to see if I could make it work ;)

HellsMaddy 5y ago

This is so cool! I think I'm going to gift your book to my niblings next Christmas. Thank you for sharing!

jonplackett 5y ago
Thank so much! I hope you enjoy

abeppu 5y ago

For anyone else who enjoys this, consider the Jailbreak the Patriarchy browser extension, which does basically this for text on the web. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jailbreak-the-patriarchy/fiidcfoaaciclafodoficaofidfencgd?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jailbreak-the-patr...

jonplackett 5y ago
This is great, thanks - this was actually my initial idea and it sat there in my head for 5 years and then morphed into doing a book. We’re doing a sequel this year and I’m going to redo the website with the aim of turning genderswapping into a movement and getting other people to join in. I’ll link this this for sure!

camgunz 5y ago

Wow this book is beautiful! Thank you for sharing.

jonplackett 5y ago
Thanks! It’s illustrated by my wife. She did a frickin incredible job! More of her stuff here if you’re interested: KarrieFransman.com