MIT Attempts to Out-Trump Trump With DeepDrumpf Twitterbot
Alexander Neil / 8 years ago
Donald Trump’s antics on social media are infamous at this point, seeming crazy and unpredictable at times. Now, we can all look forward to an improvement to Trump thanks to the field of deep learning. DeepDrumpf is a Twitterbot created by a researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and makes use of deep learning algorithms in order to generate tweets that are Trumpier than the real deal.
DeepDrumpf’s artificial intelligence platform was trained on hours of Trump transcripts from his numerous speeches and performances at public events and debates. While far from perfect, often generating tweets too nonsensical or stupid to even be from Trump himself, however, some manage to be hilariously brilliant.
I’m what ISIS doesn’t need.
— DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 3, 2016
MIT explains that the secret behind DeepDrumpf is that “the bot creates Tweets one letter at a time. For example, if the bot randomly begins its Tweet with the letter “M,” it is somewhat likely to be followed by an “A,” and then a “K,” and so on until the bot types out Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” It then starts over for the next sentence and repeats the process until it reaches the 140-character limit.” The bot’s creator, postdoc Bradley Hayes, was inspired to create DeepDrumpf by an existing model that can emulate Shakespeare, combined with a recent report on the presidential candidates’ linguistic patterns that found Trump speaks at a third-grade level.
[Romney is ]a tool. I want to tell you this. They're probably the last thing we need in a leader, We can't do that.
— DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 3, 2016
DeepDrumpf has even managed to connect with Trump’s real Twitter account. When it does so, its artificial intelligence algorithm is given language from the real Trump’s tweet, which allows a higher chance of giving a response that appears to be contextually relevant to the original.
@realDonaldTrump They're going to be paying right now, and like, absolutely. I’m really rich. Oh I want to support and have them.
— DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 3, 2016
Hayes even envisions a future where he develops accounts for all of the presidential candidates and feeding them tweets from one another, so they can have their own real-time deep-learning debates. With that in mind, who would you like to see a deep-learning bot be created for?
